Two days ago, there was a forum/panel about freedom & democracy, where the lineup included: Jeremy Scahill, Edward Snowden, Paul Jay (of TRN), Rick Wolff, and others.

Now, I know I'm biased when it comes to the topics of surveillance, the war on terror, capitalism, etc, but that does sound like a panel worth reporting on, doesn't it? It's not frontpage stuff, sure, but a column/comment online...

Nothing, last I checked. Not a peep.

Who did report on it? RT Germany.

As far as I am concerned, RT is a valid source, as long as you remain aware of their (pro-Russia) angle. It's actually a great source for stuff on the US or the UK, most of the time. Just like I've seen good stuff on Russia in the Swiss media, unlike the red-baiting so prevelant in the WaPo these days.

Place de la Concorde Suisse...John McPhee's book exploring Swiss...paranoia...
---All military age men have an automatic weapon at home; the penalties for using it or even open the ammunition other than military duty are severe
---The bridges and tunnels in to the country are rigged with places for Swiss Army Engineers to stick explosives and drop them all
---Airbases tucked into mountain sides; not nuke proof; but damn hard to get at any other way
etc
etc
etc

"in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. "

Harry Lime; Orson Well's "The Third Man"...

Ugh. Look, I don't like Trump. But however bad he is, comparing him to Hillary in terms of better/worse is like being forced to eat a sandwich made of pigeon turds or rat feces. They're both terrible. They're both sandwiches made of shit.

Being a better tasting shit sandwich doesn't change the shit sandwich from being a shit sandwich. You can try to mask the flavor with hot sauce or swiss cheese, but it's still a shit sandwich.

Hillary is an awful candidate. The only way she'd ever have a chance at winning it to be put up against someone as weak as Trump.

And vice-versa. Trump could never stand a chance unless his opponent was as disliked as Hillary.

But here we are. Shit sandwich vs. Shit sandwich.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and list reasons why Hillary is terrible. Google can offer plenty of criticisms of her---and to be clear, don't think I'm coming at this by suggesting that Trump is some kind of saint. I. Don't. Like. Him. But Trump is doing one thing right, that I don't see Hillary doing. He's engaging with the "deplorables" of the nation.

This doesn't make Trump less of a shit sandwich (Did I mention that I don't like Trump? I don't like Trump.) but it could be the difference between Shit Sandwich, and President Shit Sandwich. (Sorry!)

To explain where I'm coming from on this, see Johnathan Pie's rant on Brexit. Basically, the "Keep things as they are" campaign was dismissive of the "deplorables" of the nation. Look how that vote turned out.

The thesis of that rant is basically that for many people the Brexit vote boiled down to:

"If you've got nothing, why would you vote for things to stay as they are? At least with uncertainty, there's some hope that things might change."

Hillary, for many people, means "Maintaining the status quo." For this group, Trump is at least a different flavour of shit sandwich--which might just put him in the White House. (Sorry.)

...

Here's the link to J. Pie's rant:

http://videosift.com/video/Jonathan-Pie-on-Brexit

I love that idea.
Every citizen gets tested for psychological problems, and those that pass are trained and issued firearms, for which they agree to serve if needed, like the national guard. I would also support an opt-out of that, but those people shouldn't get guns.
With good screening, and good training, we could still not be as "safe" as the Swiss, but we could be incredibly safer and more sane than we are today with no screening and no training.

But, that plan probably wouldn't eat up 1% of the US defense budget. That budget is outrageously enormous and growing (contrary to what the right wing erroneously claims).

The big problem with that is, what to do about the millions of firearms already owned by the unscreened? Perhaps another program to require gun owners to get screened or turn over/sell their firearms? That wouldn't cover the millions of unregistered guns, but would be a start.

One problem with your anecdote. Swiss citizens (men compulsory, women voluntarily) are required, by law, to become part of their citizen military, a militia if you will, and receive intense training and practice with weapons. The process also weeds out the whack jobs, who don't get to buy guns.

The Swiss procedure should be adopted by the US. It'd be a great way to use up the defense budget without invading anywhere...

BTW, you can own Bombs/RPGs/Missiles/etc.

Just fill out a form4 to get one transferred to you from a current owner, or a form1 if you wish to make a new one.

If you get a class 7 firearms license, and make sure to make whatever you make available for sale to LEO/military, then you can also make new automatic weapons for yourself (usually by converting semi auto to auto).

You can also own tanks and fighter planes.
There are clubs where folks hang out and drive around in their tanks, and fly around in their fighters, and shoot heavy weapons, etc.

Granted, the expense and paperwork of all of these makes them something only wealthy/organized people can afford. And realistically, anyone who has the cash to play with these sorts of things has his ducks in a row to begin with. (eg. An automatic rifle runs around the 20'000 usd range.) With a median individual income of around 26k per year, practically everyone in the U.S. can't afford such items (or is unwilling to).

Things called NFA items (rockets/artillery/etc) are registered, but not denied. Since AFAIK the mid 1930's, only a dozen NFA item owners have been convicted of a serious crime, and none of those crimes involved any NFA item. Only one shooting involved an automatic weapon, and it was committed by a police officer that lost his mind.

Other than a periodic flashy event like Fla, practically every gun crime is committed by cheap pistols. Crime and lack of wealth go hand in hand. Poor people are less likely to be educated, less likely to be from a stable well adjusted home, more likely to grow up in a strife ridden neighborhood, and less likely to be able to afford more than a cheap pistol. This is why you never hear about rockets/tanks/etc regarding crime - if the typical criminal could afford them, he wouldn't have to be a criminal. Realistically speaking, the U.S. is wealthy as a nation, but as individuals, people are not that well off. Majority of the country lives hand to mouth. TBH, that's the real problem. That's not to do with exceptions/unicorns like Fla - only with the most common/likely case.

As a side note, Swiss civilians are more heavily armed than U.S. civilians. But as a people they have their heads on straighter, so gun attacks are rare.

-scheherazade

I'll just leave this here:



Canada backed out of their F35 purchases last year. McCain is the head of the Senate Armed Services committee and he has told the pentagon that they will need to reduce the buy. For the first time, they are reconsidering doing so.

Also, the latest 'little' hiccup? Concerns over ejection safety have forced the Pentagon to ground any F-35 pilots under 138 pounds from flying the jet.

I hate to break it to you, but this plane is rapidly going the route of the F22. We need to completely reconsider what we need a proper 5th gen fighter to accomplish and we need to do it with a minimum of cost. It also needs to not be a swiss army plane.

Gotta love a flatulent corpse. Only reason i bother visiting the dump sites any more. Some day my own swiss army man will come, but vhat vill i achieve first -- ze humanzentapeede or za swiss army mans? Need more corpses.

Congratulations! Your video, Swiss Army Man, has reached the #1 spot in the current Top 15 New Videos listing. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish but you managed to pull it off. For your contribution you have been awarded 2 Power Points.

This achievement has earned you your "Golden One" Level 1 Badge!

Your video, Swiss Army Man, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Swiss Army Man debuted at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where it was described among attendees as "the one where Paul Dano rides a dead Daniel Radcliffe across the ocean using nothing more than the raw energy of the corpse's farts."
*promote *quality

Tags for this video have been changed from 'swiss army man' to 'swiss army man, radcliffe, dano, farts, corpse' - edited by blacklotus90

In all your over defense of this overpriced Swiss Army plane, I have yet to see you answer 1)why we would need it considering many of our planes out perform all other nations planes already (contrary to your assertion that "every Russian fighter can out maneuver the F-16", I found that's only partly true against older, non upgraded F-16s ) and 2) how you get around the 'we won't use it much because it's far too expensive to put in danger' argument.
It can't be the best for air superiority if we are too afraid to use them because they cost too much, or if we only have a few, because they cost too much.
What I read (I'm not a pilot) is that air combat is about the kill-loss ratio, where today we expect the losses to be 0.
Again, stealth is NOT 100%, and every method used has eventually been 'cracked'. If it worked every time, I would agree with you. Since it only works until the enemy figures out how, it's not worth $1.3 trillion for ANOTHER stealth fighter, we've already got them.
This plane isn't bullet or missile proof, and will be just as visible and slow when doing real close air support...if it can. I've seen footage of warthogs landing that looked like a whiffle ball they were so full of holes. They're pretty tough.
In 10 years time, I have the feeling that international air superiority will not be our biggest concern. It's good to be prepared, but terrible to bankrupt yourself to meet a challenge that's already met, or a challenge that does not yet, and may never exist. Upgrading our current aircraft would be a MUCH better way to spend that money, and we would get WAY more out of each dollar.
The F-35 may not be in service for 10 years, and may already be obsolete by then (at least it's special systems that make it 'better' than the aircraft we have today). It really seems more like a star wars project, designed to force our 'enemies' to spend themselves into oblivion, but forcing us to the brink in the effort.
Not the "close air support" that the A-10 provides. If this is meant to replace them too, and I think it is, it will have to do what they do, low and slow.

I don't disagree that advanced systems CAN make more difference than slight performance specs, that's no reason to ignore performance, or go backwards. If it's the systems that make the plane perform better, the smart thing would be to put them on the better air frame and have a better plane all around for much cheaper. Simple.

To me, if we spent $1.3 trillion developing and tens of Billions building a fleet of these planes, it's more likely we'll eventually invent a reason to have to use them. Even if we don't, while nice we aren't killing for nothing, we will have wasted that money for nothing, and done it at a time when our debt and poorly used federal funds have the country literally falling apart... that seems more than dumb, it seems criminally insane and treasonous.

As always, my views are just a layman's perspective with no claims to expertise.

@RedSky

You correctly point out the intent of the reform, to stop fractional banking which they diagnosed as a primary driver of volatility within the financial sector. They want to revert back to a system where the banks were intermediaries the way you described it: deposit leads to loan, in this case at a maximum ratio of 1:1, no leveraging.

Unlike the current system where bank deposits are mostly created by banks themselves -- the act of lending creates deposits. In fact, deposits are liabilities of the banks, not assets. Reserves are assets, but they are only traded between entities with accounts at the central bank. And, in normal times, are provided quite freely by the central bank in exchange for other assets.

Anyway, "Vollgeld" places the ability to create money exclusively in the hands of the central bank. Controlling the amount of money in circulation was a concept most central banks were eager to drop during the '90s, since it never worked. Demand for credit is volatile, central control is inflexible, even if they could somehow quanfity the need for it ex ante -- which they can't. Hell, they can't even do it ex post. You can't quantify the need for additional money beyond what's already in circulation if the central bank's action set the conditions for a dynamic development in the first place. You can't know in advance what increases in production need to be financed, you can't know how demand for liquidity evolves over time. The quantity theory of money was buried for a reason, it ignores reality.

Anyway, I applaud the proponents of Vollgeld for pointing out the dysfunctionalities of our fractional reserve system as well as how questionable it is, ethically, to hand over so much power to a small cabal of financial elites. In fact, I'm quite ecstatic to hear them point out that a nation with a sovereign, free-floating currency does not need to finance deficits through banks -- how very MMT of them. Go OMF!

But their proposed solutions are a fallback to "the market will stabilise itself if left alone, a completely independant central bank will keep the quantity of money in circulation at just the right amount". This hands-off approach resulted in absolute devastation whenever it was applied. They want to turn the state into a regular economic subject that has to adapt to the amount of money currently in circulation. It's (the illusion of) control by technocrats, where you get to disguise policies against the masses as "economic neccessities". Basically the German Eurozone on steroids.

As for the absolute independence of the central bank: you are right, that is not strictly part of the Swiss Vollgeld initiative. But it's what almost every proponent of Vollgeld within the German-speaking circles argues for, including major drivers behind the initiative. Can't let politicians have control over our central bank or else they'll abuse it for populist policies.

They are true believers in technocrat solutions, completely seperate from democratic control.

PS: I cut down my ranting to a minimum of MMT arguments, given that many people see it as just a different sort of voodoo economics.

Edit: Elizabeth Warren's 21st Century Glass Steagal Act strikes me as a rather promising way to solve a great number of problems with the financial industry without going back into the realm of monetarism.

@radx

I think you misunderstand the Swiss referendum. It's about preventing banks from creating money through fractional lending, it doesn't restrict the central bank. Typically banks will take in deposits and lend a portion out (keeping a % as a capital buffer), that money then filters through the system and some of if returns as deposits, and the process repeats (hence the term fractional banking).

In effect banks are creating money through lending out more money than otherwise exists. It also means they lend out far in excess of the deposits they have, creating high leverage and meaning even a small level of default can lead to them eating through their capital and insolvency (see US in 2008). The referendum seems to be about effectively preventing fractional lending.

No idea what effect it would have in a country like Switzerland. The country is an exception as it has a relatively small economy but is seen globally as a safe haven currency meaning every time there is a crisis you see the CHF appreciate rapidly (similar to the USD). Naturally that tends to wreck havoc with the economy and exports since the currency value no longer reflects the real economy and is why the central bank has taken various measures to discourage it in the past.