So delusional.
You really think only Democratically led cities and states offer civil servants pensions?! OMFG! LMFAHS!

I suppose from your ridiculous insinuation you believe if the contract wasn't signed by a republican president, governor, or mayor, it shouldn't be honored even if it's legally binding?

What about police pensions?

*facepalm

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)

The social contract is obey cops when asked. When this does not occur things escalate. Sadly both sides has amp up over the decades. Now both sides have lost control,respect and have distrust for each other.

Don't need to banning police dept just publicly change with both sides agreeing.

I propose, in big broad strokes.
No one goes to jail unless a serious crime murder, armed robbery or a warrant is out on you.

IF pulled over, be cool, comply, knowing nothing will result in arrest/ jail.

If you have a dime bag, kilo coke, etc, I don't care, they take it and fine you the value also. Also the right to gather you address and those with you. Then because e of your offense the PD ( where ever you live or moved to) has a 6 month right to knock and cursory search of your residence ( and those with you). Same deal they find, take anything illegal and fine of equivalent value. LB of weed, Kilo of coke I don't care. Take and fine. Guns take and if used in crime then warrant for arrest. Finding stuff allows cops to stop by again with in 6 months and now have right for thorough search. Same deal search, take and fine. If 3rd search occurs and find stuff then criminal charges filed if heavy drugs or amounts found.

With this in place no would / should put up a fight. Cops not to make arrest, populate jails or f over people with high court costs.

This should help change bad behavior, let minor crap slide, and bad dudes land in jail fair and squarely.

Like this joke of a bit, Systemic racism is a farce.

This is not the 50, 60 70 80s.
2020 and anyone can be anything.

The last segment:
Kimberly Jones is WRONG
You don't own anything because you haven't tried to achieve anything.
This social contract is this :
Stay married,
Stay in school.
Don't get in trouble.
Learn and get ahead.
You fail yourself but blame others.
You are the sum total of you decisions.

She and those who think like her are damned to be failures, pimped out by false Democrat promises that does nothing to help.

https://reason.com/2020/03/31/2-2-million-american-deaths-from-covid-19/

Here


"The 2.2 million figure was a projection based on a scenario where not only do the government and private companies not engage in any "control measures," but individuals don't on their own change their behavior to avoid contracting or spreading the virus. The study refers to this possibility as "unlikely," but let's be blunt: it's entirely fanciful. "

That's the origin. So yes, we are doing better than if the entire country 's population of individuals did nothing, AND the government did nothing. That's technically true, but it's about as likely as people sitting at their desks when the office catches fire.

Businesses like Blue Flame? They're the fake company created in late March to take hundreds of millions in deposits for medical products they couldn't produce....ventilators, ppe, etc. They took state's money and utterly failed to secure or ship any of the lifesaving supplies they contracted for and have been sued by multiple states for the cash back, but no one can get back the lives they ended by not supplying the medical supplies or by wasting states time and resources relying on them.
One guess who started this fake supply company....Republican lobbyists and fundraisers who quit their jobs in March to start this deadly con.....a con Trump facilitated by refusing to take federal control over the supply lines and instead telling states to fend for themselves with zero federal oversight, pitting them against each other AND the federal government who often seized scarce medical supplies found by the states, only to hand them off to middlemen who then resold them to the states again (and likely tipped off the feds so they could seize more supplies). That's a recipe for cons like this....as a repeatedly convicted con man himself (fraudulent school con, fraudulent charity con just to name two convictions for fraud from the last 4 years), Trump was well aware that's the case.

...and who is surprised that large numbers of Trumpsters were foolish enough to listen to him and drank bleach?

Drink the bleach, then flush your nose with ammonia. Don't let the liberal fake media tell you it's dangerous, they just want you to be sick so it makes Daddy Trump look bad. If you don't believe me, you can at least wash your skin with a mixture of the two....just ignore the clouds of chlorine gas, they're also a liberal hoax.

Only fools on team Trump.

Care to explain why Trump gave a no bid $55 MILLION contract for distributing n95 masks to Pantera, a subsidiary of a bankrupt defense contractor company with zero employees?...a contract that lets the company owner use the power of the federal government to buy the masks at as low as $.63, then sell them to the government for $5.50 each? Pantera provides no service for that near 1000% markup, the Fed finds/orders the masks (and probably pays for them and transfers ownership to Pantera for free), then buys them back for nearly 10 times what they cost. Care to explain how that's NOT just Trump handing millions of taxpayer dollars to a rich supporter?

WTF? he he "dung" he he

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I know, right? Even though these videos are a major source of advertising and hype for 40K, GW is notorious for being cease-and-desist happy. But I have to wonder if there is a bit of legal wiggle-room here - is it fair-use? Is it because the authour hasn't monetized the videos?

Hopefully, GW realises how great these are for introducing people to the 40K universe. They could *easily* contract the artist to make a proper series out of these...I'd pay to watch it.

Best to investigate Trump and his cronies in real time, it minimizes the damage he can do. The investigations have already exposed numerous senator's insider trading attempts to profit from the pandemic. It's also revealed the reason Trump refused WHO tests and put us months behind S Korea...the company that makes the American test donated over $1.5 million to political campaigns this year. That must be why it was worth waiting months to get them at all and still be in short supply. They paid for the contract.

So, Democrats work hard to try to save the lives of their constituents, Trump, because he has nothing better to do besides play more golf, wrote a nasty political smear filled with ignorance and self congratulatory lies. Keep in mind, he's admitted he's so incompetent that his impeachment, which he claimed was a nothing burger, distracted him from having time to properly deal with Coronavirus....but he had plenty of time to golf.

Trump was pushed to enact a travel ban from China a month after the danger was clear to everyone with a brain, it was not him dragging the CDC like he claims, but he had dragged his feet so long that most airlines had cancelled those flights well before he acted....but not before numerous infected were here. January first he should have acted. That would have made a difference.

Trump called this a flu until it was too late, telling the nation there's no need to prepare through February. This led to panic when reality hit us hard.

Trump publicly said that if Democrats aren't nice enough to him his Whitehouse won't respond to their state. That's politics being played with millions of lives by Trump.

Trump has publicly told governors to go find supplies on their own, don't look to the Fed to procure and distribute necessary medical devices, then ordered the Fed to bid against those states for that same equipment. That's playing politics with citizens lives.

Trump STILL refuses to order a nation wide shelter in place order because he doesn't want any responsibility for one. That's playing politics.

Trump inexplicably didn't use the defense production act until last Friday, but he's used it reportedly hundreds of thousands of times to procure materials for the military....chemicals for missiles, materials for aircraft carriers, using the law to put the military orders first in line repeatedly. That's playing politics.

Trump reluctantly had ventilators sent to a few hard hit states, <5% of the numbers needed, but shipped broken units to Democratic states and told them they need to be appreciative (translation, kiss his ass on TV) or he won't send more. Again, playing politics with citizens lives.

Also don't forget Trump ended the CDC international pandemic detection program last September, months before the outbreak in China. This program was designed to detect and protect from New viral outbreaks, and would have given America a fighting chance to avoid any infections at all had it not been killed by Trump.

This kind of ignorant propaganda is exactly what I expect from @bobknight33. Using Trump's statements as if they're fact is incredibly dumb, Bobby. Even you admit the man doesn't tell the truth, you just prefer his divisive lies to the truth.

Hilarious you tag this philosophy, it's not...news, it's not.....*lies , that's a proper tag. *facepalm
I would downvote, but this drivel isn't worth watching through. I was at my lie limit under one minute in.

BTW, someone should remind him, nuking them from orbit didn't stop the xenomorphs....it didn't even stop that outbreak of xenomorphs, it only exposed the ignorance of the Space Marines for thinking "nuke em" answers all problems. So dumb Bobby.

In tomorrows news, woman contracts Lupineovirus!!! lol

This is the dumbest video I've seen. These things aren't about giving "Free"stuff, It's about allocating the revenues back to the people who pay the taxes.

This money is already being taken from the populous in the form of Taxes, It's a matter where the money will be spent.

Currently that money goes to Huge Military contracts and paid to big corporations, and back room deals to Big Business.

Take the highest promise on that list, and it still barely scratches how much money is being funneled into these businesses already owned by the rich as they siphon off every penny they can to the already rich corporations.

Don't blame the union. Unions have ways of sidestepping that process and contracts have provisions for people to be fired for blatant and flagrant violations of the law.

He wouldn't be on administrative leave if he drove his cruiser through a crowd full of kids while he was drunk. Similarly, there's no investigation to be done here.

He attacked a child - and if there was a reason to justify the first assault, I'm assuming it's the usual "police presumed to be acting in good faith" would be thrown up because that's fair ^eye-roll^; even that doesn't hold up to the second slam. The second slam is an individualized version of a squad-car running through a crowd. It's blatant, flagrant, and criminal.

We need to stop treating COPs (citizens on patrol) like a class of citizens that can get away with this shit or receive any special treatment. If that man was a custodian, he'd be fired on the spot and arrested. Then if he was black it wouldn't matter if his hands were laid flat on the ground and he was spread eagle screaming "I AM NOT RESISTING ARREST AND AM UNARMED" someone would shout

He's on paid administrative leave because that's what the union contract stipulates. The reason being he shouldn't be penalised because he's waiting for the outcome of the investigation.

He's been removed from the situation.

The process is to protect the unjustly accused, not benefit the guilty.

I suspect I know what the real game is here: a military contract for forward operating bases...
You still have to move the diesel for the generators---although I know the military wants to get more and more into solar...The cost per gallon at the front line for diesel (transport and whatnot)---is unbelievable when calculated.

In 2009, the cost estimates varied from $40 to $400/gallon...