My stepfather was in an 8" howitzer outfit on the Western Front in France in 1918. Before he died in 1985 at the age of 93, he told me a lot about being on the receiving end of a German artillery barrage.

He said that there was no way possible for anyone to understand what it was like unless you had been there yourself. He also stated that he had seen several BRAVE men go insane after having over 1,000 (that's right, one thousand!) rounds come down in just a few short hours.

Unfortunately for this good man, he was gassed with Mustard gas. He suffered from this for the rest of his life, and until about a year before he died, still had nightmares about being shelled.

Thank each and every one of you who have served!

From an ex-Staff Sargent, 379th Bomb Wing (Heavy), Strategic Air Command, USAF 1968-1972

The last total eclipse near florida was in 1918 and the next one is in 2045, so I guess I'm going to be waiting a long time.

NASA is my friend
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEatlas/SEatlas.html

What's wrong with Mexican flu? Fits in nice with the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.

Do not time travel to 1918. Got it.

I'm against any medical care being supported, advertised, promoted, and conducted with taxpayer money.

Tell it to the millions who died in the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. Healthcare is a public good with the same rationale as public fire department, public police departments, public military, public highways, etc. One person's lack of healthcare negatively influences the health of everyone around them.

Public healthcare is a matter of NATIONAL SECURITY. That kind of stuff pushes your conservative buttons, right?

>> ^Psychologic:
Wouldn't it be more likely that high crime and poor living conditions would cause more religious faith rather than the faith causing the crime? Hardship is a very strong reason for seeking a blissful afterlife.
That would certainly fit the findings of the study. He never really suggested causation.



I quote from Quirkology by Richard Wiseman (an awesome read, by the way): Chapter 3 "Believing six impossible things before breakfast: Psychology enters the twilight zone.", pg 102-103

"By the middle 1920s, inflation in Germany was so high that paper money was carried in shopping bags, and people were eager to spend any money the moment that they had it, for fear that it would be severely devalued the following day. By 1932, almost half of the population were unemployed. In 1982, Vernon Padgett from Marshall Universty and Dale Jorgenson from the California State University published a paper comparing the number of articles on astrology, mysticism, and cults, appearing in the major German magazines and newspapers between the two world wars, and the degree of economic threat each year.* Articles on gardening and cooking were also counted as controls. An index of economic threat was calculated on the basis of wages, percentage of unemployed trade union members, and industrial production. When people were suffering an economic downturn, the number of articles on superstition increased. When things were going better, they decreased. The strong relationship between the two factors caused the authors to conclude that:

'... just as Trobriand islanders surrounded their more dangerous deep sea fishing with superstitions, Germans in the 1920s and 1930s became more superstitious during times of economic threat.'

The authors link their findings with much broader social issues, noting that in times of increased uncertainty, people look for a sense of certaintity and this need can cause them to support strong leadership regimes, and believe in various irrational determinants of their fate, such as superstition and mysticism."

*V.R. Padgett & D.O. Jorgenson - 'Superstition and economic threat: Germany, 1918-1940', Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin #8, pages 736-74. 1982.

I guess you could look at the above study, and then look at what may occur within areas of the United States during this coming time of harsh economic crisis as well. Will it create an increase in religious belief/ferver and a higher degree of trust into other areas of superstition, the supernatural, and mysticism?

When times are hard, which I'm sure they are in some of the countries used in the study conducted which is discussed in the video, more people will want some sort of "control" in their out-of-control lives. They find that sense of "comfort" in handing control over to forces they believe to be "more powerful" than just mortal men and women.

>> ^blankfist:
Backyard? Oh, someone must live in the valley.


Actually...This was my previous house in Echo Park (just behind Dodger Stadium) I shot that back in November and just got around to cutting it together yesterday. The house was built back in 1918 so they had yards in both the front and back, back then.

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” -Theodore Roosevelt, 1918

Yes - when you are taken to an emergency room, you are treated first, but ~70% of all visits to a hospital do not come through the emergency room, and if you have insurance, and go through the emergency room, you are the one who has to haggle out whether or not that visit was covered by your insurance company.

Otherwise, if you are in the ~70% of people that do NOT go through the emergency room, your doctor has to haggle with your insurance company, in most cases, to determine what is deemed as "covered" by the insurance company. It is in this stage that many people die waiting to be treated - sure, the possibility to treat them is there, but if their insurance company won't cover it, they usually can not afford it...and the insurance companies will deny most every treatment they can.

Well, we'll have to see what happens in Massachusetts then - as Capitalism goes, a 100% demand for something most often raises the prices of it. Do you not think that a 100% demand for insurance will cause insurance companies to increase advertising in Massachusetts, just to get a piece of the pie? Do you not think that such advertising will create more of an economic dependency on the insurance companies, and in turn, they will be forced to raise prices? After all - they're certainly not going to lower them. The risks involved in insuring even just single individuals stays the same, regardless of whether they have one person covered, or an entire state.

"If you look at the past, you'll find people suffering from diseases and facing early death at a much higher rate than today" - oh, so you've seen statistics, eh? Please post the data source here, so I can actually review it. As it stands right now, I have subscriptions to 3 major data warehouses and can't seem to find much of anything prior to the late 1800's(and I've looked, and charted death rates from then to now - if you want them in CSV or any other format, I will export them for you).

No - you learned from your history books that "if you look at the past, you'll find people suffering from diseases and facing early death at a much higher rate than today" in quite a broad sweeping generalization that has very little statistical backing...or actual statistics, for that matter. It's pretty well known that, around every 60-80 years, the human race suffers from a bug that infects around one fifth of it's population, and kills off literally millions - the last happening around 1918(The 1918 Influenza Pandemic).

Now, even with the discovery of antibiotics, the human race is learning of "antibiotic resistant" strings of pathogens - unusual? - I think not. Would it really be all that surprising if another bug infected around one fifth of the human race, starting some time within the next 10 years? Not really - and yet it's just another thing that civilization has not actually helped with.

"goal of the Fed is long term stability"

Pre-Fed
-------
Panic of 1819-1824(4/5 years)
Panic of 1837-1843(6/7 years)
Panic of 1857-1860(3/4 years)
Panic of 1873-1879(6/7 years)
Panic of 1893-1896(3/4 years)
Panic of 1907-1908(1/2 years)
1776 to 1914(137.4 years[July 4 founding]) Total = 23 to 29 years - 21% of our time(max) spent in economic turmoil
OR(if you want to be technical) 1819 to 1914(95 years) - 24%(min) to 30.5%(max)of our time spent in economic turmoil

Post-Fed
--------
Post WW1 Recession - 1918-1921(3/4 years)
Great Depression("The Great Contraction") - 1929-1937(8/9 years)
Post Korean War Recession - 1953-1954(1/2 years)
1973 Oil/Energy Crisis - 1979-1980(1/2 years)
1982 - 1983(1/2 years)
1988 - 1992(4/5 years)
2000 Recession - 2001 - 2003(3/4 years)
1914 to 2007(93 years) Total = 21 to 28 years - 22.5% of our time(min) spent in economic turmoil

How has the Fed helped us establish "long term stability?"

Sure, not ALL of them were CAUSED by the Fed, but they haven't exactly PREVENTED any of them, either.

As a matter of fact, the very fact that they purposely CAUSED at least one of them should be enough for our government to deny their charter and to repeal the Federal Reserve Act.