[ExI] anti-capitalist propaganda, was: retrainability of plebeians

[spike]

...On Behalf Of Jeff Davis
>...
> On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 11:04 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> 
> >...
> 
> Spike, you're trying so hard to invent -- out of whole 
> cloth,...out of no cloth...out of thin air -- some sort of 
> misdeed here...

Jeff you are right.  I take back everything.  I saw something that gave me
great hope that all will be well, or at least all will be approximately
neutral.  Or perhaps all will be not as horrifying as I had feared.  Earlier
this evening in discussion with a friend offlist, he commented:

> So relax.  Get some perspective.  Practice your critical thinking 
> skills...

To which I replied: ...I will relax as soon as our government realizes this
latest budget is sheer madness.  Actually I think they will, soon.

A few minutes after posting that comment, I read this and posted thus:

>Well I'll be damn.  I am a prophet!  A seer I tells ya:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/14/obama-deficit-unsustainab_n_203726.
html

This is the actual quote, which causes me to think 0bama gets it: 

"We can't keep on just borrowing from China," Obama said at a town-hall
meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. "We have to pay
interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children's
future with more and more debt." 

Holders of U.S. debt will eventually "get tired" of buying it, causing
interest rates on everything from auto loans to home mortgages to increase,
Obama said. "It will have a dampening effect on our economy." 



Well yes.  I have been wondering for some time now, what in the hell is
going to happen when interest rates start to go back up?  Where are we going
to get the money?  Prostitution?

...
> 
> > Jeff suggested the income source was prostitution.
> 
> Not exactly.  JOKINGLY...

I was joking too Jeff.  I was swinging on your vine there.

> ...In short, the 
> more prosperous of his crowd supplied the party treats.  

The book makes it sound like he was buying.  But it matters not, for no one
cares, nor do I care, what anyone did as a teenager, just so long as he and
the other two (Reid and Pelosi) stop spending that way NOW.  I am more
liberal that you, Jeff, more than anyone, for I think all drugs should be
legal, all abortions are fine with me, all the liberal everything is fine,
the military should be no larger than necessary, but the federal government
should be out of most of what it is doing.  Completely.  In my view they
would do little more than operate the military and maintain the interstate
highway system.  The fed could pay off the social security debt by selling
its land (yes including the national parks, and shame on our generation for
devouring those), stop collecting new social security, for everyone now
recognizes it as a ponzi scheme.  Then let the stategovernments compete
against each other, with their differing tax schemes.  Then every American
can have it her own way, and the power lusters would go down to the state
level.

> 
> So wean yourself from the obsession with dissing him...

OK I am done with that.

>... and 
> start thinking about proposals for the new administration 
> about how to transition LockMart from death machine welfare 
> queen to extropic vanguard of new paradigm life-enhancing 
> technologies...

Better military technologies do exactly that.  

Consider the advances in warfare in the 20th century.  World War 1 saw men
facing each other in trenches, firing at close range, poison gas, human wave
attacks, etc.  A more horrifying scenario could scarcely be imagined.  

The second world war was scarcely less deadly.  It was still kill the other
guy, war of attrition, carpet bombing and nuclear weapons, but by the time
the proxy wars of the 50s and 60s came along they realized the ideal was not
to slay the adversary but merely to wound him, for then the enemy needed to
use his resources to carry off and care for the injured.  

As weapons become more accurate, the amount of necessary explosive is
reduced.  The newest warfare paradigms are a logical extrapolation: one
carries the weapons aboard a drone, operated by guys in an air conditioned
office in Nevada somewhere, and shoots not at the soldiers but rather at the
trucks, armor and missiles.  The logical extension of shooting to wound the
enemy gives way to the new paradigm of not shooting the enemy soldiers at
all, but rather to send them home perfectly healthy, for the super accurate
tiny missiles are not particularly effective as anti-personnel weapons
anyway.  But they are great for punching a small clean hole all the way thru
the engine of a truck, disabling it.

And such a wonderful name too:

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-chinalake20-2009apr20,0,7799907.story

This approach eliminates a lot of problems.  No war refugees to protect and
feed, no prison camps to have your own soldiers photographing themselves
misbehaving, none of your guys being taken prisoner and being asked their
name, rank and serial number just before a tiny minority saws his goddam
head off, no Private Ryans to rescue, no expensive planes being shot down,
no wrecked buildings to pay for, reduced carbon dioxide emissions due to all
that motorized armor that no longer runs, no stressed out soldiers going
crazy and slaying their comrades, no reason for concern over the sexual
orientation of the joystick jockey sitting in the next cubicle, no husbands
or children missing their mothers who have gone off to war.  

Now, given that technology, do we still call them death machines?  Jeff I
would call them life machines.

> ...
> ...Hard to tell what the 
> real situation is when one is carried along in an avalanche 
> of bullshit...

Very much agree.  There was one story which sounds so outlandish I do not
know yet if I believe it.  In the second week of February, the president was
reported to have whipped up some enormous emergency that was so urgent he
persuaded congress to vote upon a stimulus bill of enormous and
unprecedented scale, a document with over a thousand pages, and gave them no
time to read the thing.  So they passed it, in a partisan manner, but the
president was not sitting outside the chambers ready to sign it immediately,
but rather went on vacation for several days.  I must believe Fox made this
up, for it is far too absurd to believe.  Any bill which is too big to read
is too big to ratify.
 
> > This isn't politics as usual, for it appears to me we are somehow 
> > pretending that all this wild spending does not need to be paid for.
> 
> A concern not raised when the shrub was spending trillions -- 
> doubled the national debt from 5 to 10 trillion -- on 
> destruction: destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan by bombs, 
> destruction of the US by paying for the bombs...

On the contrary, the concern was raised by me, and I proposed a solution at
the time, which I will repeat.  We pass an amendment to the constitution
requiring a balanced budget.  Each year's spending is limited by the
previous year's tax income.  The only exception is if the president declares
the executive privelege provided by the war powers act, at which time she
can exceed the previous year's income, BUT: if those war powers are enacted,
the president has NO OTHER POWERS than running that war to its conclusion.
There are no speeches, no committees, no nothing, most importantly no POWERS
other than commander of the military.  That president effectively becomes a
lame duck military commander until peace is restored.  This will discourage
the power lusters and will encourage the president to live within her means
or get the war over quickly.

...
> 
> And another personal note:  I would personally prefer that 
> rather than print money and pass the debt responsibility on 
> to future generations of working schmos, that the rich be 
> made to pay the whole damn bill...

Jeff the problem with this approach is that there are two critically
different definitions of the term rich.  To you and me, rich means those who
HAVE a ton of money.  To the government, rich means those who currently MAKE
a ton of money.  What you already own is irrelevant to the government for
that isn't taxable.  Only what you make is what the government can tax.  The
rich already pay the whole damn bill, if you define rich the way the
government does.

spike