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Biden loves his crime bill of 1991. In hi sown words.

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)

Your video, SNL sketch from 1991 "Sinead O'Connor Awards", has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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Carefully

None of the endothermic reactions in this video have been suggested as methods to regulate global temperature, because even if they could be scaled up enough to make a global difference they don't address the systems which regulate the earth's temperature.

Some things which have affected global temperatures either up or down are:

• Volcanic eruptions can cause global cooling, for example the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption released around 20 million tons of sulphur dioxide causing global cooling of approx 0.5°C over the following three years (ref: https://earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/sensing-our-planet/volcanoes-and-climate-change and https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs113-97/ )
  
• Increased rates of erosion of the right type of rocks can increase CO₂ absorption and reduce global temperatures that way, https://earth.stanford.edu/news/how-weathering-rocks-cooled-earth#gs.cmy3h0
  
• Cyanobacteria, https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/evolutionary-accident-probably-caused-worst-snowball-earth-episode-study-shows-1026
  

Automatically replaced video embed code with backup #1991 (supplied by member RedSky) - video declared dead by member ant.

Adding video to channels (80s) - requested by ant.

Well, looks like they have been working on scramjets too.

Apparently they made the first flying example ever, in 1991.
Not sure how that squares with the earlier U.S. efforts, maybe because it flew on its own? I donno.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet_programs#Russia

-scheherazade

Regarding Perry and Counts: that was in 1991. Again it's terrible, but you can't really argue that we're suddenly "abandoning of proof and evidence".

Re Banks: That's undoubtedly terrible, but to me, that's far more of an indictment of the appalling state of the US justice system and the nightmare of the utterly broken plea bargain system (I think John Oliver did a report on it, and I'd also highly recommend listening to the current season of the Serial podcast). He chose to take the plea deal... he wasn't convicted.

I think it's also not a coincidence that all three victims are black. Juries are far more likely to convict black men... that's just a fact.

And again, these cases are notable because they're rare.

The point here is simple. Trump's "it's a scary time to be a man" line is complete and utter bullshit. There is no sudden epidemic of false rape allegations. Are people wrongly accused (and in some cases, even convicted) of rape? Undoubtedly.

But it's not a new problem and it's nowhere near as widespread as the right is making it out to be.

Meanwhile, in the USA someone is violated every 98 seconds, and the President mocked a sexual assault survivor.

One of these is a bigger problem than the other.

That's wonderful! In high school, my choir director was Ben Ayling, the bass for 1991 international champion quartet, The Ritz. So we had our own student quartet, which we called, in proper Simpsons-style naming convention, The Ritz Bitz.

For anyone wondering, the number on the prison tattoo is a reference to Deadpool's first comic appearance: New Mutants #98, which came out in February 1991 - NM980291.

My first trip overseas from the U.S. was to Dublin in 1991 and I was enthralled by the Irish people, their accent, the street signs in Gaelic and pretty much everything else. It was great to be in the land of James Joyce, the Pogues, Clannad and U2. I almost had to remind myself at first that this is not some kind of Disneyland exhibit, that this is the way they are and have always been. Then I bought a "sausage roll" from a snack shop which turned out to be a big chunk of spam. Brought me right back to reality.

Since I quite enjoyed the talk I'm willing to overlook that fact He did also have some good examples of actual cold welding.

NASA has an interesting lessons learned article about the Galileo high gain antenna failure, which also seems to be more nuanced than "it was cold welding" - http://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/492

p.s. I got curious about the reference to Gemini, and I'm not 100% sure but I think it might come from a 1991 paper "On-Orbit Coldwelding Fact or Friction?" by Dursch, H. & Spear, S. (Bibliographic Code: 1991NASCP3134.1565D) or else it's from the paper it references as ref 5 (I. Stambler "Surface Effects in Space", Space/Aeronautics, Vol 45 No. 2, 1966 pp. 63-67).

That paper gives the opposite impression to the start of Derek's talk, rather than cold welding being discovered around the time of Gemini, it was often thought to be a problem around that time but as he says later was subsequently found to be quite rare (Dursch and Spear found no actual cases of cold welding causing spacecraft issues, they were usually friction issues due to fretting or galling caused by loss of lubricants, but still recommended taking precautions to avoid coldwelding).

I love Snopes. Of course, the devil is in the details:

"The editor of the biographical text about Barack Obama which was included in the booklet maintained that the mention of Kenya was an error on her part and was not based on any information provided to her by Obama himself:

"Miriam Goderich edited the text of the bio; she is now a partner at the Dystel & Goderich agency, which lists Obama as one of its current clients.

"'You're undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me — an agency assistant at the time," Goderich wrote. "There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more.'

"A New York Times article about Barack Obama published in 1990, a year before the Acton & Dystel promotional booklet was issued, correctly identified his birthplace as Hawaii.

"A variant of this item paired the image shown above with the statement "Big Oops! Harvard Law Review did not cleanse its 1991 yearbook which states he was born in Kenya." As noted above, the biographical sketch pictured above was put out by a literacy agency; it was not part of any yearbook published by Harvard."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogfight

Dogfighting first appeared during World War I, shortly after the invention of the airplane. Until at least 1992, it was a component in every major war, despite beliefs after World War II that increasingly greater speeds and longer range weapons would make dogfighting obsolete.

In the Gulf War of 1990–91, dogfighting once again proved its usefulness when the Coalition Air Force had to face off against the Iraqi Air Force, which at the time was the fifth largest in the world. Many dogfights occurred during the short conflict, often involving many planes. By the end of January, 1991, the term "furball" became a popular word to describe the hectic situation of many dogfights, occurring at the same time within the same relatively small airspace. Oh, fun fact, most of those planes 'dogfighting' in that 'relatively small airspace' were F15's...

But you can ignore that if you want. I mean, ACM schools that teach dogfighting even today probably don't exist...

I linked earlier the marine test that certified the F35 even though it failed the test pretty much completely. http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/not-a-big-suprise-the-marines-f-35-operational-test-wa-1730583428

There may have been smart people, but they didn't have any noticeable effect.

Seriously, do you know when raping your wife became a crime in the UK (a relatively progressive country)? 1991. I was 14. I remember seeing it on the news and being shocked.

It is still legal to rape your wife in large parts of the world. (yes, some of that is disputed, point still stands).

Not sure what you mean by "the modern era"? Women were certainly working, and have been since the dawn of man. Ruling empires? Occasionally, but only ever because their fathers were kings/emperors. Victoria might have ruled over the British empire, but if she was a commoner, she couldn't even have voted. NZ was the first country to extend the vote to women in 1893. Suffragettes are still considered to be "first wave feminists" (although I dislike the whole "xth wave" terminology).

And no, I wouldn't accept that argument, because helping the poor, treating each other with understanding, etc are not uniquely Catholic concepts; they're not even the core concepts of Catholicism. In fact, Catholics have been historically pretty goddamn awful on the whole " treating each other with understanding" front.

OTOH, feminism is, again by definition, the concept of equality for women.