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SeminoleFSU
Voluntaryist
Ah, the no response defense.. that's what all TDS sufferers resort to. I'm sure if we continue the discussion you'll eventually get around to calling me a racist, sexist homophobic, xenophobic, etc. LOL.
Off Shore
Off Topic Member
Nah I'm out...something about being dragged down and beaten with experience.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Clinton didn't try to appear to be a super patriot tough guy, nor did he go around insulting actual heroes. Can you imagine the outcry from the Republicans if Clinton or Obama had said the same things Trump has about McCain?
I'm looking for data on homelessness rates over the years back ideally thirty plus years.Web searching for quite a while I don't seem to find what I'm looking for, which I thought would be immediate, you know homeless pop function of year. Only finding back to 2007. Knowing you folk on top of it wonder if you could give me a link. Thanks.
Have you tried the federal census data?
Search Results
King county wa also does a one night count each year. So try googling king county homeless. I only see online data back to 2007 but supposedly they have been doing it for a couple of decades. So you might send them a request for their older reports.
Thank you very much. I checked the first ten some links in that list. Same thing, no further than 2007. The data is being hidden. This is because homelessness spiked, that year, not back in the seventies when Reagan betrayed his neighbors by throwing out the mentally impaired onto the streets., unforgivable though that was. I'd like to receive further data though.
You know the www did not exist much until the mid 1990s. Data earlier then that is sporadically available.
If you are doing serious research you might try sending an email to housing and urban development dot gov.
There is this link which might interest you..
Creating a science of homelessness during the Reagan era. - PubMed - NCBI
You probably didn't hear any of us complaining about anything Clinton when he was president because this forum didn't exist.
I can only speak for myself, but one thing that really irritates me about anybody, especially those in leadership positions is hypocrisy. Clinton avoided the draft for Vietnam, but he never advertised himself as any kind of gung ho military type. Both GW Bush and Donald Trump did things to avoid Vietnam, but advertised themselves as very pro military.
John McCain had his downsides and I think he was temperamentally unfit to be president (at least by 2008 standards), but he earned the cred to be pro military. I don't recall there ever being another major party candidate for president who not only spent several years as a POW, but also suffered some pretty serious injuries when he was shot down.
To digress a bit...
What I see going on with the GOP today has a lot of parallels with Germany in the 1930s to the mid-40s. The Weimar Republic era in Germany (from the end of WW I to the early 1930s) was a time of upheaval in German culture. The Treaty of Versailles slapped heavy payments on Germany to pay for the war and it bankrupted the economy. They had hyper-inflation similar to Venezuela today.
Two extremist factions were vying for control of the country: communists and fascists. The fascists led by Adolf Hitler won out.
A lot of Germans were very skeptical of Hitler. He was very popular in Bavaria, but not as popular in the rest of the country and Berliners definitely disliked him to a large degree. Hitler and the Nazis promised to get Germany back on track and through the 30s they did a good enough job to win over quite a few in the population.
Germany bluffed the British and French several times in the late 30s, taking back the Rhine, taking over Czechoslovakia (first taking a chunk then later the whole country) and Austria as well as rebuilding the military in defiance of the Versailles Treaty. Each time the French and British blinked because neither country had much of a stomach for another war. Hitler won over a lot of critics who didn't like his tactics, but liked the results.
When Hitler plotted with the USSR to divide up Poland, Hitler expected the British and French to blink again, but they didn't and the war was on. After an easy campaign to take Poland, Hitler got together with his generals to plot the invasion of France. The generals wanted to take a more conventional approach following well established military doctrine, but Hitler insisted on a bold, brash invasion that got called Blitzkrieg by the media.
Militarily the Germans took some wild risks in the May 1940 invasion of France and the Low Countries. If the British and French had just made one concerted attack on Rommel's undefended flanks as he dashed the coast, the invasion would have probably collapsed.
After May 1940, the Germans got victory disease. Hitler went from a subject of derision by the general staff of the Wehrmacht to a military genius who sees things no other general sees. After that Germany got into some very no-win situations and the Wehrmacht didn't even try to stop him until it was way too late.
When the war turned on Germany, a group of rebel officers tried to assassinate Hitler and after the war Germany became vehemently anti-Nazi. The port war German government has been driven by two things: don't let the economy spin out of control again like the 1920s and suppress anything Nazi.
The US has differences with Germany. The conservative media convinced a lot of their audience that the situation in the US was as bad as the late 20s in Germany, but while we have problems, they have never been that bad. That same media had been telling their audiences that anyone to the left of Attila the Hun was equivalent to a communist since the early 90s.
IMO, the US does have an unhealthy fascination with its military. The last time the US actually had to defend the continental US from a real foreign invader (not women and children refugees, an actual army) was the War of 1812. The last time a hostile enemy force had a foot on US territory was 1945 (when the Japanese garrison on Wake Island surrendered). After WW II, for better or for worse the US became the world's cop. But we really didn't need to fight any of the wars since WWII. The unified Korea would be a pretty dismal place now and Kuwait would be a province of Iraq, but most of the rest of the places the US fought wars would probably be better off.
A country needs a military, but the US is like a billionaire with a conspicuous consumption habit out of control.
But the US has not been on a militaristic stand like Germany in the 30s and 40s. But because of the hyping by right wing media, it opened a hole for someone with a lot of similar attitudes as Hitler to come to power. The "generals" of the Republican party as well as all other political pundits were saying that 2012 was the last time a Republican could run for president primarily soliciting the white vote. Since the early 1980s the percentage of whites voting each presidential election has dropped about 2%. The margins in the white vote were supposed to be too narrow in 2016 to use that tactic again.
But Trump managed to bring the percentage white vote back up and because the Democratic candidate was so disliked, the non-white vote was suppressed (as well as tactics by Republicans in power to limit the Democratic turnout). Because Trump defied the experts and won, he got the grudging respect of the Republicans who personally hated him, but liked the result. Much like Germans did by the late 30s and early 40s.
Then the economy defied gravity for the first two years of the Trump presidency, despite all the economists saying we were way over due for a recession. That further enhanced Trump's magic with the Republicans who remain his fair weather friend.
But all signs are that the economy is beginning to falter. Trump won a victory in 2016 everyone else thought impossible, but like the Germans in the Battle of France, he had surprise, trickery nobody was expecting, and a lot of luck to succeed. His enemies have dug in now and they won back territory in 2018 despite being in a disadvantaged position in a lot of places due to Republican trickery.
There was evidence of Russian social media manipulation in 2018, but if it had any effect it all nobody has been able to measure it.
One thing the inside baseball people in the Republican party are sitting up at night worrying about is what happens to the Republican party after Trump. Other politicians have tried to replicate Trump and lost badly because you need to be very far gone psychologically to pull off what Trump does and none of the people trying to copy him are actually mentally ill. Or at least not to the degree Trump is. Trump will be out of the picture one of these days. He won't live forever, and his political career probably has a shorter shelf life.
They will try to stuff the genie of crazy back into the bottle, but they probably won't succeed, and I expect the Republican Party will tear itself apart as different factions try to seize control. The Democrats have stayed together for over 200 years because even if they do squabble, they manage to pull themselves together when they need to. The Republicans are much more about falling in line and if the factions refuse to fall in line, there will be a massive battle for control that could get out of hand.
The US has a lot of things going for it that Weimar Germany didn't. First off the actual reality of what's been going on in this country the last decades is nowhere near as bad as the 1920s economy. And the US has 240 years of tradition of rule of law, Germany only had 10 when Hitler broke it.
Hitler was crazy, but he was also quite intelligent. He wasn't as brilliant as he thought, but he wasn't dumb either. Trump really is not that bright.
Hitler was very pro-military, but he was actually wounded and awarded medals for his service in WW I. Trump talks tough, but even though he's well known for his TV catch phrase "you're fired", he is really too chicken to fire anyone in person, though he does love having people fired.
Hitler had a decent sized cadre of true believers around him and many actually did have some competence. Trump has an inner circle of a few family members and a few other hangers on, all wildly incompetent.
The problem with rule of law is that it works great when most of the people involved agree to follow it, but when there is a powerful enough or large enough group who says "screw it" and ignores the law, the rule of law can be broken and the country is then headed to a very dark place. Rule of law in the US is closest to collapse as it has been since the constitution was ratified.
Right now we are at a number of crossroads in several areas. Trump fired Nielsen because she wouldn't blatantly break the law at the border. Stephen Miller actually wants to kill the refugees.
The House committee chair who is authorized by law to see anybody's tax return has put in a request for Trump's. The law designates that the Treasury Secretary must hand them over, but several administrations back the Treasury Secretary handed that duty over to the head of the IRS and due to another law about designating powers within departments, Minuchin can't just take back that power on a whim. If he does anything he will be violating the law. And the law says the Treasury Department must hand the returns over. So will they be handed over despite Trump saying no?
And then there is a number of people on the right who have this notion that the President has unlimited powers within the Executive Branch and neither the courts nor Congress can stop him or her. (They conveniently forget this when a Democrat is president.) Antonin Scalia was a very strong proponent of this. Apparently so is William Barr.
I think it is patently unconstitutional as the whole document is about separation of powers and the checks and balances between them. The history of this country has been the various branches checking one another. But we have some people who think the president should be a monarch in influential places. If they get their way, the rule of law could break.
I do think the rule of law will hold the line in the end, but I know way too much history to be comfortable. Nothing is forever and every great power has something that breaks it eventually.
I'm glad you like them. As I recently said to someone privately, I think I do it more for self therapy than anything else. My parents were Republicans and my father was a Young Republican in college. He would probably be pretty lonely if he was at his alma mater today, Art Center School of Design. But he was there in the 40s, which was a different time.
I grew up surrounded by Eisenhower Republican ideals (though Eisenhower died before I was aware of the world). In some ways, the Republicans of that era were more liberal than Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. Richard Nixon almost brought in universal basic income and the Republicans were pushing for the Equal Rights Amendment.
The Republicans during the New Deal through the late 70s were the party of small business more than anything else. They stood for social progressive ideas, rational fiscal policy, and were a bit stronger on defense policy than Democrats. Though both parties were big on defense.
I was a bit of the frog in the boiling pot initially about Reagan. I voted for the first time in the 1984 presidential election and voted for Reagan. I wasn't thrilled with him, but Mondale really put me off. My father had been more in favor of George HW Bush in the 1980 campaign because he was more of an Eisenhower Republican than the new breed coming in with Reagan.
By the late 80s I began to suspect something was wrong with the Republicans and I left the party behind before 1990. The party has devolved over the last 40 years. The Democrats have changed too, but it's been a combination of being like the abused spouse in a relationship and absorbing a lot of ex-Republicans like me.
I saw clear signs of fascism in the Republican party by the GW Bush administration and I was hoping it would stop when Bush essentially failed, but they keep doubling down on the stupid. I'm very concerned where we go from here.
If the Republican party does collapse, that would initially probably be a good thing as it would reduce resistance to fixing the things they broke, but there are some wildly unworkable ideas on the left too. Living on the outskirts of a very liberal city, I've known some pretty nutty lefties. I haven't been as concerned with them because they had no chance of getting into power anytime soon, though they are just as nutty in their own way as the extreme right.
I came to the conclusion many years ago that the middle path is often the healthiest. The extremes usually lead to bad results. There are occasions when an extreme is necessary, but when done by people who have the intent to pull things back to the center, it's usually done right. Historically the US electorate has been pretty centrist, which has resulted in US politics staying within a narrow margin center-left and center-right. But one side has become very radicalized due to the media they consume and it's thrown the whole system way out of balance.
How do you define extreme? We agree about the right, but I have trouble with some categories.
Above I have tried to identify legitimate pride in race or clan if not based on prejudice. We would agree, probably, in eschewing violence or policies inadvertently leading to it. The Libertarians in class when teaching were always civil and made good points intelligently. Notable Libertarians are sometimes in total agreement with my revisionist views of U.S. foreign policy but might disagree on how to get there. Going back to the gold standard and Smoot/Hawley tariffs would qualify as extreme in my book along with individualism pushed to the extreme of anarchism. Cf: Benjamin Barber, Superman and Common Men: Freedom, Anarchy, and the Revolution, which I taught for several years.
One of my Libertarian colleagues objected to this text so despite the incongruity, I invited him to speak before the class. Among the students I sat next to a senior citizen of African dissent who had been trouble for me earlier until I suggested "I haven't time to deal with your question now, but would be able to do so after class." To which he then replied, "yes boss." About which I felt guilty. Sitting so close to him the alcohol on his breath was stronger than mine.
Mr. X was unleashed on the occasion of my guest lecturer. "Shut up," he finally said and in response to Mr. X's reply, "Why?" said "Because I'm the teacher." Later my colleague said, "I was surprised, you run on even looser leash in class than I."
With any label a coda about style is probably needed. Civility is a requirement for society.
Edit: We shall find out in the next election if Lady Liberty shall prevail because of civility or be sold back to France for scrap. To paraphrase Jack Webb, "Just the alternatives, mam, not an advice."
Above I have tried to identify legitimate pride in race or clan if not based on prejudice. We would agree, probably, in eschewing violence or policies inadvertently leading to it. The Libertarians in class when teaching were always civil and made good points intelligently. Notable Libertarians are sometimes in total agreement with my revisionist views of U.S. foreign policy but might disagree on how to get there. Going back to the gold standard and Smoot/Hawley tariffs would qualify as extreme in my book along with individualism pushed to the extreme of anarchism. Cf: Benjamin Barber, Superman and Common Men: Freedom, Anarchy, and the Revolution, which I taught for several years.
One of my Libertarian colleagues objected to this text so despite the incongruity, I invited him to speak before the class. Among the students I sat next to a senior citizen of African dissent who had been trouble for me earlier until I suggested "I haven't time to deal with your question now, but would be able to do so after class." To which he then replied, "yes boss." About which I felt guilty. Sitting so close to him the alcohol on his breath was stronger than mine.
Mr. X was unleashed on the occasion of my guest lecturer. "Shut up," he finally said and in response to Mr. X's reply, "Why?" said "Because I'm the teacher." Later my colleague said, "I was surprised, you run on even looser leash in class than I."
With any label a coda about style is probably needed. Civility is a requirement for society.
Edit: We shall find out in the next election if Lady Liberty shall prevail because of civility or be sold back to France for scrap. To paraphrase Jack Webb, "Just the alternatives, mam, not an advice."
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Reveal is the one consistently lied about Tesla. It's the one falsely reported the Fremont factory doesn't have yellow warning lines and signs because Elon doesn't like the color yellow. They are the ones telling lies about "horrible" working conditions in the factory, despite of CA state government's investigation says the opposite.
Reveal and the new York times caused me to question the liberal media, hence the liberal politicians. I now think they are pretty much as bad as Trump and his minions. Obama handed the bail out to the bankers without asking for breaking up the bank's, or anything at all. He is the one who allowed those criminals walk away with tax payer funded Golden parachute. All those so that he can collect speech fees from the bank's, and go on their yachts for vacations.
Good question. I'm sure different people would have differing opinions about what makes someone an extremist.
Throughout history most extremists are characterized by absolutist politics that leaves no room for other views. They seem to approach those with any differing opinions with intolerance and a desire to do harm to those who disagree (though it can just be psychological harm). They also justify these attitudes.
People also have situations where under stress they can be temporarily intolerant, but at other times are open to other views. Extremist politics tends to be permanently inflexible.
Here is another summary of blasts at socialism.
Conservatives Don’t Hate Socialism, They Hate Equality
IANAT (I am not a theologian) but was socialized early on as a Christian and actually taught Sunday school as a teenager. I think a terrible gap in the PR war for socialism in this country is missed. Though a non-believer now, if memory serves, Jesus was a lifelong fighter for economic justice. As the Pope's encyclical argues so eloquently, dominion over the Earth is not to dominate but to be a shepherd.
Conservatives Don’t Hate Socialism, They Hate Equality
IANAT (I am not a theologian) but was socialized early on as a Christian and actually taught Sunday school as a teenager. I think a terrible gap in the PR war for socialism in this country is missed. Though a non-believer now, if memory serves, Jesus was a lifelong fighter for economic justice. As the Pope's encyclical argues so eloquently, dominion over the Earth is not to dominate but to be a shepherd.
For a long time organized religions have looked all alike to me. Deep down the majors all advocate the same message. "Love impersonally." Then due to science education I have come to venerate the universe. How many suns have died to make the very elements of our bodies? No comparison with Christianity intended. Math becomes a vulgarity here, but as an old geezer....
Responsible investing here causes us to have some moral scruples. The rape of Mother Earth is a no, no. Is that the first law of morality dictated by physics first principles? What might be the other commandments?
Responsible investing here causes us to have some moral scruples. The rape of Mother Earth is a no, no. Is that the first law of morality dictated by physics first principles? What might be the other commandments?
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Exclusive: U.S. lawmakers introduce bill to boost electric car tax credits - Reuters
This is what I wrote this morning to those who represent me in Congress:
I am quite supportive of the intent of the Senate bill announced today to extend the EV (electric vehicle) tax credit. However, rather than having it apply to a specific number of vehicles per manufacturer, I would recommend a single sunset date be set for all manufacturers. This would encourage the laggards and not relatively penalize those automakers that were early to introduce electrification. I would suggest a date around 2025.
Others here may also want to write Congress.
Meanwhile, one problem is that while this bill is being debated and Trump's reaction remains uncertain, some potential buyers may wait.
This is what I wrote this morning to those who represent me in Congress:
I am quite supportive of the intent of the Senate bill announced today to extend the EV (electric vehicle) tax credit. However, rather than having it apply to a specific number of vehicles per manufacturer, I would recommend a single sunset date be set for all manufacturers. This would encourage the laggards and not relatively penalize those automakers that were early to introduce electrification. I would suggest a date around 2025.
Others here may also want to write Congress.
Meanwhile, one problem is that while this bill is being debated and Trump's reaction remains uncertain, some potential buyers may wait.
MikeQ
Member
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I suspect they pick a numerical cap because that gives a concrete budgetary dollar amount.
I suspect they pick a numerical cap because that gives a concrete budgetary dollar amount.
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