Yeah, I've seen references like this. It's crap. A quick Google search turned up articles where fat people were motivated to lose their weight because of fat shaming. There was a recent article in our local paper that made a similar point. You can always find a study to support your view. I prefer the evidence of my own eyes.
Obesity has soared in one generation because we now refer to fat women as BBW. Manufacturers of planes and cars, clothing are now designing for heavier people.
Acceptance of fat has led to the current crisis (and I do acknowledge the role of the fast food industry which I compare to the tobacco industry).
Remember how cigarette smoking was once seen as glamourous? Not any more... it was re-branded as a disgusting vice that took its toll on your health, your looks, your breath and people (like me) dropped the habit so that in one generation it's the exception rather than the rule.
Sure, there are hardcore smokers who will never be cured. And some fat people are always going to stay fat rather than develop some willpower. But it should never be accepted or promoted somehow.

It's not a chicken/egg argument...

Big corps cut the costs and cap wages, then the government is forced to assist people so they don't starve or become homeless.

Why do you think wages have stagnated in the US while profits have soared?

But okay, I'll huff some glue and try to accept your world view. Government ends assistance. Instantly, Walmart loses a huge chunk of government income (they no longer profit off the items they sell to food stamp holders) and now they have to bump up wages by 4 bucks as well. Of course, why didn't we all see it before, Walmart would do these things out of the fucking goodness of their black cold dead hearts and accept a huge cut to their profit margins...

Hang on, the glue is wearing off... Yup, you're just a moron...

Just my opinion here, but I think there are better ways to solve the issues with soaring profits while paying people nearly nothing for said profits.

Negate tax loop holes. If you're making a billion more each year, you shouldn't be showing a 0 dollar tax burden year after year. Incentivize expanding (lower taxes, etc), heavily tax companies who sit on their money or offshore nearly everything but still call themselves a US company. You should not get both the benefit of low cost offshoring, while the US has to maintain a military presence, infrastructure, and other safety/security institutions that allow you to operate your business and live in safety as you do.

Regulations on speculation that have made a lot of markets spiral out of control. I'm no economist, but when you see prices rise and fall based on rumors and possibilities...look at fuel prices especially. People shouldn't be making money on commodities when they have no hand in adding value to said commodity. If they aren't processing/shipping/extracting/packaging/ANYTHING but sitting on something waiting for a price spike, you need to take that avenue of profit out of the equation. There are places out there with enough buying power they can literally buy all supply, hold it for a few days to jack up the price and sell it off. Creating false shortages should get you a kick to the nuts.

Basically put profit back into production and manufacturing instead of offshoring and screwing with markets to get profit.

Leads to stagnation and often times inferior products as people race to the bottom to drive costs down to increase profits.

For stagnation, look at the broadband market. They have done jack and shit to improve it for a long time now for the majority of the the US, there is absolutely no reason for them to because monopolies and ability to drive costs down while continuing to jack up the rates and influence laws in their favor.

Inferior products, a good example of this would be the Craftsman line of products. Or hell something as simple as kitchen utensils...they look the same until you've had em for a bit and your forks and spoons are bending and not holding up in the dishwasher like they should getting kinda "off" looking.....probably made in China or some other Asian nation with inferior stainless steel. Then you got your US made ones, they might be more expensive but they still make them the same way they did your grandparents silverware...which your grandparents left to your parents and they still look better than the inferior china ones.



This is why I don't believe offshoring lowers consumer prices, because you might spend less on a single thing..but it likely won't last as long and you end up either buying a "good quality one" or repeatedly buying shitty ones. I do however believe offshoring lowers COMPANY costs, and increases their profits. Rarely does stuff actually end up cheaper once they offshore it, and if it does it usually comes with a swift decline in quality.


Lots of ...."off" ways of thinking about things that have become ingrained into the media and people's minds. And I think it's intentional. Minimum wage debate puts the focus on the "greedy" worker, and gives them another reason to move more jobs offshore "to maintain low prices for consumers" yet the company profits continue to go up. IE they pay less to make it, you pay the same or more to buy it. And people are too busy blaming joe schmoe for his minimum wages to notice they just keep doing this shit.

Muslim fundamentalists seem to be more numerous and powerful than the Christian ones. The reasons for this have little to do with the religious fundamentals themselves as laid out in their holy books. Both books are full of soaring praise of peace and execrable lust for vengeance over imagined slights. Both books really do say that those who don't worship your way should be put to death. Whether you listen to the nasty parts or the nice ones has everything to do with your relative economic situation. If you are satisfied with your lot, it is easy to find the passages of your screed that advocate peace, harmony, and tradition. If you are unhappy and see yourself as oppressed, it is easy to find the passages that advocate war, upheaval, and radical acts of violence against the oppressor. Muslim fundamentalists are more numerous and powerful than the Christian ones because the Muslim countries are poorer. The radical messages get more traction among them. The more poor Christians we accumulate in this country, the more our own homegrown radicals, the WBC, will be taken seriously.

If you divided up the wealth and land, in a few years it would look exactly the same as it does now.

BTW, obamanomics has been a smash hit: taxes for everyone--not just the evil rich--have soared, unemployment is permanently high and the economy is at a near-standstill.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-10/google-revenues-sheltered-in-no-tax-bermuda-soar-to-10-billion.html

Googles' rich, bitch!

"To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble."

Paul Krugman, 2002.

Remember "The New Economy"? particularly how new-fangled, computerized market analysis would do away with the old laws of economics altogether? That was the idea that guided US economic policy in the Clinton era.

Greenspan was a big proponent of the idea, although apparently he did at one point have his doubts. I don't know how much that ideology informed policy after the dotcom crash, and how much of it was just a desperate attempt to keep the US economy from tanking altogether, but the crisis was successfully weathered, or postponed until 2008...

Tired of that $2.6 Million Program that Teaches Chinese Prostitutes to Drink?

by John Ransom


Liberty is about a lot of things; it’s a deep topic. But at its core liberty can be summed up in one simple and reciprocal concept. That concept is respect.

You know the 2010 last election was about many things, but it was mostly about respect.

It was about starting to restore the respect that people have in government, by getting the government to restore the respect that they show to you…by taking liberty seriously.

If you are like me, you think that many of our elected officials from both the right and the left truly believe that what they think of you is much more important than what you think of them.

If you’re like me you’re tired of a trillion dollars in so-called stimulus spending that went to mob-connected asphalt contractors rather than the pockets of working families who own businesses and pay taxes and do all the working and dreaming in this country.

If you’re like me, you’re tired of a $2.6 million program that teaches Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly while unemployment soars across the country.

If you’re like me, you're tired of an arrogant federal government which pays out $47 billion in fraudulent claims in Medicare every year while they lecture the rest of us about healthcare economics.

If you are like me, you’re tired of the US Postal service wasting $30 million on a program that pays 1100 employees to do nothing. Yes, today, the US Post Office sat 1100 employees in empty rooms, as they do every day, and literally paid them to do nothing. They can’t play cards; they can’t watch TV, in fact they can’t do anything at all. To the tune of $30 million per year.


Yet this very same federal government comes to us now and proposes to manage our healthcare, our retirement, the education of our children, the auto industry, the oil industry, pharmaceuticals, the mortgage industry and lectures the American people that they are under-regulated.

If you’re a middle American like me, from the grassroots, I bet you know someone who owns their own business; if you’re like me you probably know someone who has paid employees of that business on time every week, but hasn’t been able to pay themselves a dime. Yet these very same people who provide half the new jobs in our economy, who have lost money over the last few years, still owe the government tens of thousands of dollars in taxes every year. People wonder where our jobs have gone? They’ve been crushed by a system that doesn’t honor job creation; by a system that doesn’t honor liberty; a system that gives no respect.

And if you are like most of the voters I speak to, you are tired of insiders from Washington and Wall Street on both sides of the aisle, and their wasteful spending schemes that don’t even propose to solve the very issues facing Main Street and working families.

Let’s suppose global warming is real; I don’t think it is, but let’s say it's so for the sake of argument. Show me please how the Renewable Electricity Standard-- which will cost American families $1800 per year-- please show me how it’s going to lower the earth’s temperature. They can’t because the Renewable Electricity Standard wasn’t created to combat global warming and it won’t lower the earth’s temperature.

Ok, so let’s suppose the issue is carbon emission; that carbon is really bad and we have to get it out of our atmosphere. Show me please how the Renewable Electricity Standard is going to reduce the amount of carbon in our atmosphere. They can’t. It wasn’t designed to do that and it won’t do that.

The government doesn't write legislation with solutions in mind, but rather with power and control of your very lives. And it is inside of your lives where you will wrestle back that control.

I’m often reminded that it’s with readers just like you where many of the seminal events of our country happened. It’s in rooms just like you’re in right now that a small group of patriots in Massachusetts planned the Boston Tea Party; it’s in groups just like you are a part of today that was born the Mayflower Compact; it’s in the free association of our citizens, for the common good and with common respect, that the greatness and goodness of our country will always be found.

And as long as people like you, freely associate for the common good and meet in respect, our country will always remain both great and good.

But ordinary people are paying attention, actually reading the Constitution; people are actually asking questions about the 10th Amendment, asking: What kind of power does Washington really have over us?

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough people who have been awakened to that yet, that’s why readers like you are so important. Each individual reading this is so incredibly important because the job you have this year as a citizen has never, ever, ever been more important. The 2012 election is going to determine what it’s like to live in this country for a long time. It’s going to be people just like you, having conversation just like this, in rooms across America that are going to make a difference.

This is the chance to turn the tide. The chance we have today is to bury that last vestiges of big government in our country; to reclaim our liberty from a new deal and replace it with a true deal.

I’ve been very fortunate because over the last half dozen years I’ve been able to travel all around the country working with grassroots activists just like you. I understand, I think, better than elected officials, what makes the grassroots so special. It's you and your ability to communicate.

We have all these new tools available for citizens to communicate that just a few years ago we didn’t have. A few years ago readers wouldn’t have been as energized and as informed because we didn’t have the ability to communicate as we do now. We have been so fractured and fragmented all around the country and around the nation that we feel like we can’t do anything, that Washington is so big and out of touch that we can’t do anything.

In fact, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Now is the time we really do have the opportunity. For the first time in our history ordinary citizens have the ability to communicate with one another over the heads of the media in publications like Townhall. We are networked on social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter that expose us to thousands of people for free.

But when I was growing up there were three TV stations and two newspapers in every town that decided what the news was. There were probably a dozen people in any town that picked our news for us.

Those days are over.

This election isn’t about voting for the next person standing in a long line of elites who will rule over us; it’s about what kind of country we want to be in the future.

It’s about preserving the American dream right here right now. Because when they mess with our liberty, they really mess with our ability to dream.

I believe that the ability to dream is worth handing down to our kids.

I believe that it’s our dreams that makes us the most dynamic country in the world.

It’s the dream that brings jobs and prosperity to the US.

It’s a dream that treats promises like they really matter.

And it’s the dreams that are the promise of America.

Because when politicians treat the promises they campaign on like they matter, when they are held accountable to those pledges-- by us-- we will restore the respect they owe us.

I would expect him to get in gear in the coming debates.
>> ^NetRunner:

I'm gonna wait until after election day before saying it worked, but I agree, that's the most reasonable explanation for why Obama seemed so unwilling to go on the attack in the debate.
I'm hoping we hear him sound a lot more like this in the next one.
>> ^KnivesOut:
The President gave Mitt Jagger Romney enough rope to hang himself on, knowing that Romney's mouth is his own worst enemy, and it worked.
Obama's Approval Rating Soars to its Highest Point in Three Years

I'm gonna wait until after election day before saying it worked, but I agree, that's the most reasonable explanation for why Obama seemed so unwilling to go on the attack in the debate.

I'm hoping we hear him sound a lot more like this in the next one.
>> ^KnivesOut:

The President gave Mitt Jagger Romney enough rope to hang himself on, knowing that Romney's mouth is his own worst enemy, and it worked.
Obama's Approval Rating Soars to its Highest Point in Three Years

The President gave Mitt Jagger Romney enough rope to hang himself on, knowing that Romney's mouth is his own worst enemy, and it worked.

Obama's Approval Rating Soars to its Highest Point in Three Years

Well technically they got king of the hill taken away by a completely free to play game that you don't even have to buy. League of legends soared past them in active monthly users last November and they haven't slowed down. There was an article on forbes about this time last year where LoL had double the amount of monthly gameplay hours. I think WoW is finally dying.>> ^RFlagg:

If WoW would just adopt the Buy to Play model like Guild Wars 2 I would come back (if they kept the price low, say $30...$40 tops for this expansion as I've got the ones before it). With Guild Wars 2, Planetside 2, trying learn DOTA 2 and LoL and the host of Free to Play stuff, it is getting harder to justify the monthly fee. I liked Cataclysm, and I would be all over this, but money is too tight to waste when there are high quality titles out there that are buy to play or free to play. I predict an uptick in subscribers for a few months then the continual bleed of subscribers to other titles... though they'll still be king of the hill as even if they drop to 6 or 8 million by this time next year, they'll still be ahead of everyone else... I'll wager around 7 million left, around 5 or 6 million they might start thinking of making the move to another business model to test it out for Titan and get the bugs of the model worked out. I think Blizard's high quality justifies a Buy to Play over the Free to Play model...
As to the movie. Sam Raimi was slated to direct it, and may still be producing a part of it... last I heard Charles Leavitt was taking over the script and then they were going to call for a new director.

Now sometimes you’re up and sometimes you're down,
When you find that you’re down well just look around.
You still got a body, good legs and fine feet,
Get your head in the right place and hey, you're complete!

"Now as for the dancin', you can do more,
You can reach great heights, in fact you can soar.
You just get a leg up and ya slap it on down,
And you’ll find you’re up in what’s called a bound.
Bound, bound, and rebound.

I have nothing to gain by defending Zimmerman, with the exception of pointing out the usual media bias as they crucify him.

I offered up a flawed scenario of what might have happened, minus the full range of facts (which no one has at this time). Why did I suggest 'Evil Zimmerman' is a radical leftist theory? Because they're the ones that insist America is (still) an evil place inhabited by nothing but racists, and since Zimmerman is not Black--the only race that according to the left can "never" be considered racist--Zimmerman is therefore an evil racist.

The lower-than-whaleshit non-FOX media have turned this into a media frenzy, and don't think His Earness isn't grateful for the chaos, it takes attention off the shitconomy and soaring gas prices.

The question is NOT, "Did a kid deserve to end his life over this?" and if it is, you'd better be prepared for the answer to POSSIBLY be Yes. The non-Fox media have been very careful to only show the pics of 12-year-old Trayvon, not the 17-year old posing as a thug, tweeting about hassling Whitey, who physically is more than capable of killing someone.


Zimmerman could end up being as twisted as Dexter, otherwise I don't see a motive for his actions. It's one thing to pretend one is a bigshot, a whole other game to actually (needlessly) put oneself in a life-or-death situ where control is literally guaranteed to be lost in an instant.


>> ^VoodooV:

QM and Pennypacker resort to strawmans as usual. flinging terms like "radical left" without consequence. The sift needs some serious moderation around here.
No one has convicted Zimmerman...end of story, get that bullshit out of your heads. It really is quite irrelevant who the attacker is. The real question is:
Did a kid deserve to have his life ended over this? And the answer is most assuredly...
NO!!
It truly is despicable that this has turned into a left v right issue. This is the sort of thing that should be uniting us, not dividing us. EVERYONE, left and right should be ashamed.