Althouse: "State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond..."

September 17, 2010

"State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond..."

"... parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death."

New details from the Great Leap Forward, 1958-1962, in which 45 million people died.

238 comments:

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garage mahal said...: Wonderful, but Treasury has $2.3B in equivalent liabilities. That's why it's all a wash.

The wash is that you pay into the the system and you don't have to eat out of dumpsters when you retire. Pretty good deal. You have to wrap youre head around the fact that the U.S. government would have borrowed and repaid back the same amt of money from another lending source to begin with.; 9/17/10, 10:47 PM
Julie said...: I'm a little late to this party, but another difference between Mao and American ghettoes: The column said that Chinese parents were sometimes *forced* to bury their children alive in Mao's China, which indicates that they didn't want to do it, right? But it's become relatively commonplace in American ghettoes for people to willingly dump their infants in the garbage. In China, the parents were victims along with the child; in America, the parents are monsters. Not quite the same.

wv: pests -- I really think "monsters" is more appropriate here, but I rest my case.; 9/17/10, 10:49 PM
I'm Full of Soup said...: Garage:
Try to wrap your head around this. If the money had been set aside and they kept their hands off of it, the deficits would be even bigger- they used the money to mask the size of the deficits. Are you really OK with that?

The acct methods would never pass scutiny on Wall Street or the SEC. Are you really OK with that?

And the trus fund does not exist - no matter what you have been led to believe. It is a fiction of a fantasy told by liars to fools [we Americans].; 9/17/10, 11:05 PM
garage mahal said...: And the trus fund does not exist - no matter what you have been led to believe. It is a fiction of a fantasy told by liars to fools [we Americans].

"In December 2009, 42.8 million people received OASI benefits, 9.7 million received DI benefits, and 46.3 million were covered under Medicare"; 9/17/10, 11:14 PM
GMay said...: Jesus garage, can you fucking read?

The total public debt exceeds anything SS is taking in. By a mile. There is no surplus and never was. You don't get to ignore your overall debt, especially when your "assets" (the bonds you keep referring to but obviously know fuckall about) consist of debt securities that you're creating yourself.

Try that shit in a business and see which happens first - your arrest or your bankruptcy.; 9/17/10, 11:29 PM
Nate Whilk said...: AprilApple said, I met a left-wing democrat once who told me he thought Mao's purges were necessary.

Einstein didn't think Stalin was all that bad.; 9/17/10, 11:31 PM
Cedarford said...: As Pitchfork Pat Buchanan, the original Tea Partier said:

"Are not these the same people who assisted George W. Bush in stampeding the nation into an unnecessary war that got 4,400 Americans killed to strip Saddam Hussein of weapons he did not have? That lied by saying we would have a quick exit strategy and not squander lives and treasure in a "Bill Clinton-like" nation-building project such as Bosnia became?

Are these not the same people who misled or deceived us about Iraq's role in 9/11?

Are these Republican scribes and senators not the same folks who went all-out for NAFTA and GATT and the WTO and MFN and PNTR for China, those brilliant trade deals that gave us $5 trillion in trade deficits, wiped out 6 million manufacturing jobs and 50,000 factories in one decade, and put us into permanent debt to China?

Are these not some of the same folks who backed the Bush-McCain amnesty and did nothing for 20 years, as millions of illegals invaded America? Now that all America is on fire, they too want to "build the dang fence."

======================
The Republicans did not remember Nixon only did detente to triangulate one dangerous mass murdering enemy against the other.
Beginning in Reagans era, right wing and neocon ideologues began spreading the message that Free Trade with the cadres that did the hands on killing of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution - were like they later said about Iraqis and Pashtuns "Noble Democracy hungry freedom lovers".

The Chinese go in cycles, They moderated some in the 80s, but their undercutting the world in labor in the "Free Trade, borderless economies structure" has seen them become highly proud, nationalistic, and aggressive towards weaker neighbors and growingly...the US and Japan as their huge military buildup continues.

The Republicans gave us in large part our destroyed, deindustrialized economy. China as the wealthy nation we are now all beholden to ---All for short-term Wall Street profits trading middle class jobs for the revenue temporarily gained by wrecking industries and the once tax-paying, still patriotic middle class workers employed there. And masses appeased by ChinaMart megastores with everything from cheap high tech goods to Chinese-made pet food stuffed into the aisles.

Yes, Bill Clinton sold the American worker out to Wall Street super-rich...just like the Republicans did. And Bill Clinton wanted Open Borders and wars of adventure, too!

But brainless partisans have to realize the American public is fed up with "but the other side betrayed you too!" - excuse-making.

At the same time, this country needs competent leaders, not brainless charismatic Bimbos throwing out red meat to the rubes.

Meanwhile, Pat Buchanan is convinced it is too late to avoid a partial collapse of America and the West. He gets a spare-time paycheck from liberal MSNBC after the progressive Jews blocked him from work in other media venues. He writes books that once dealt with why America may collapse, Europe too...and is starting to write what we should do during and after the collapse.; 9/17/10, 11:31 PM
GMay said...: "The wash is that you pay into the the system and you don't have to eat out of dumpsters when you retire. Pretty good deal."

Until the system collapses and your grandmother moves down into your mother's basement with you garage.

"You have to wrap youre head around the fact that the U.S. government would have borrowed and repaid back the same amt of money from another lending source to begin with."

Who are the lending sources garage? Can you answer that question, or is it gonna go down the memory hole too?; 9/17/10, 11:32 PM
GMay said...: "Treasury bonds historically have had the highest credit ratings and are considered one of the safest assets in the world."

Man, you're in overdrive here. Another question for you - what do you know of the rating agencies and how they factored into the current financial meltdown? Do you know how treasuries are financed? Do you know what's backing those bonds?

I know you don't know the first thing about any of this and you aren't going to answer any of my questions, but I like seeing just how much of a fool you can make of yourself.; 9/17/10, 11:39 PM
garage mahal said...: The total public debt exceeds anything SS is taking in. By a mile. There is no surplus and never was.

Correct. By a mile. Because SS alone doesn't service 100% our our total debt obligations! It was never designed to. I don't know anyone that claimed it was, or supposed to. You're veering into some eco-birther weirdness here. The wheels are coming off.; 9/17/10, 11:55 PM
NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...: Communism wasn't just an ideology, it was a way for despots to rule in the 20th century.

When the way of the future was liberal democracy, it was hard for despots to make a go of it.

When everyone became disillusioned with the idea of constitutions and endlessly debating parliaments, the way for despotism was open again.

Communism at its heart was a anti-Western modernizing ideology (which is why it went nowhere in the West) that promised real progress without having to emulate anything Western. And, here's the thing, it legitimized any dictator that could seize power, as long as he was anti- Western enough.

It had something for everyone, but at the cost of millions of lives.

Really, anyone who was honest about the actual results of Communism had no excuse after about 1953 (really, the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi-Soviet pact should have done it, but we'll give some people the benefit of the doubt until Stalin died). People who made excuses after that were either willfully ignorant or hated the West so much that they didn't care.

The really scary thing about Communism, which Orwell touched on, was it's ability to escape any moral judgment, and it's ability to evade any rational account of its deeds. Millions of people died, and countries didn't grow rich. It failed on all levels. Yet you can still find people who go on about how inhumane capitalism is... without being able to see how bad the alternative was...it boggles the mind.

Yet this myth is still with us, even now. Really, it's about having an alternative, any alternative, to Western success.

HMMM sounds familiar, doesn't it?; 9/18/10, 12:59 AM
NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...: And what's happening in our political sphere is not anything on the same scale as what happened in China. Putting arguments about statism and health care in the context of 45 million dead Chinese is... not appropriate. The farthest of far left European social democracies don't murder people over stealing a potato.

Communism wasn't just an idea, it was an expression of local conditions. Just how often it became so violent tells us about the places it took hold. Places with a tradition of violence, despotic rule, and opposition to Western ideas and colonialism. So it wasn't JUST Communist ideas. Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and Cuba certainly murdered people, but nothing on the scale of what happened in Russia and China. Why?

This is a question that both critics and whatever few apologists for Communism don't really try to answer, because it doesn't fit the narratives. A lot of countries that embraced Communism did so for their own reasons, and so it wasn't just a foreign idea that killed people. It was the expression of the dark side of their own societies. This is easy to see with Germany and fascism, but people are less willing to look at China or Cambodia this way, for some reason.

What saved the West was that it didn't swallow its critique of itself. Despite a lot of elite and common opinion to the contrary, ultimately people just couldn't walk away from democracy, with one very dangerous exception.

In fact, the West fought WW2 to destroy the biggest threat to freedom (really, that's the right word) the world ever produced. Germany was a lot more dangerous than the USSR ever was. Communism had wide appeal, but it's ability to kill was mostly limited to its own subjects.

Facism was the real threat, and the one piece of credit I'll give Communism is that Russia didn't fall in 1941. That's the biggest good it ever did the world.; 9/18/10, 1:11 AM
Jum said...: But Ann, you forget that Mao cleaned up drug abuse...well, kinda. Oh, and Chiang Kai-shek was, like, a meanie and a real downer, too.

So let's put that stuff about state-sanctioned murder/starvation of 50-60 million Chinese in some kind of perspective, okay?

I mean, Jeez, it was the same way with OJ. People just ignored the fact that in 1973 he ran for over 2,000 yards in a single season.; 9/18/10, 1:15 AM
buddy larsen said...: Richard Dolan,

Saul Bellow might belong on that list, with The Dean's December.

Except for your comment, it wouldn't've occurred to recall the book, or its theme --the shrinkage of personhood under the state of deadened unreality --i guess one could describe it --the action happens to a Chicago professor --well, a Dean --whose wife's mom is a respected Romanian academic who is ill and dying as the book opens.

The American couple's journey to make a vigil, and the strands of the dying life behind the iron curtain in the early 1980s, as seen by the two Chicago academics, are what the novel was years ago and pre-Obama. But now i recall the long passages (tho not what they said)trying to convey something sinister emergent in hometown Chicago in the early 80s when the novel was written.

Hmm, re-read time.

Anyhoo, it's a weekend read --slim volume, quick prose, mercifully counterpoint to the characters' turgid lives in the democidal atmosphere of commie Romania.; 9/18/10, 2:08 AM
David R. Graham said...: "Anyone old enough to remember all the lefties during the 60's and early 70's with their little red books?"

See Peter Sellers, Leigh Taylor-Young, Jo Van Fleet: *I Love You, Alice B. Toklas.*

Yes, I remember it, clearly!; 9/18/10, 2:28 AM
jr565 said...: "But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao,
you aint go make it with anyone anyhow"
An example of when Lennon was great and not the communist fraud who wrote Imagine and why the Beatles together are the Beatles and why the Beatles apart are a bunch of talented musicians who write a few good songs. And of course, Lennon later disowned this lyric, but of course he was right to begin with.

Sadly,many who carried pictures of Chairman Mao either didn't know or didn't care what was going on under Chairman Mao's, and, in this country they were able to walk in their collective circles unmolested in their ignorance. To this day, people, many of them young or REALLY stupid, still hoist the communist banner without thinking about the MILLIONS of people who died or lived miserable lives under that banner all across the world. IN this country of course, many of the biggest socialists are also among the richest. And paradoxically (though not really) very often the ones speaking loudest about communist principles are millionaires who own huge mansions and live rich, opulent lives. Perhaps they imagine that those living under Stalin or Mao were similarly living such opulent lives, but as this article suggests, many more were simply murdered or buried alive. Someone should point out to the rich socilaists that their mansions and lives were brought for them by capitalism and but for the system that they hate, they too could be unlucky to be born in Mao's china and be doused in urine or have their nose cut off or starved to death when older.; 9/18/10, 2:34 AM
Alex said...: To this day, people, many of them young or REALLY stupid, still hoist the communist banner without thinking about the MILLIONS of people who died or lived miserable lives under that banner all across the world.

Alas I know this to be true, conversing with young people on music forums. They are dyed-in-the-wool socialist fanatics. They are extremely dangerous because they KNOW they are right and everyone else is wrong.; 9/18/10, 6:11 AM
Nagarajan Sivakumar said...: My bald faced stupid argument is working pretty well, and has been working pretty well since 1935.

@Garage,
You are pretty ignorant and it’s amazing that you show your stupidity to the whole world to see. Social Security did not start the way that it operates currently right now. It was created by FDR, but it was not until the late 40's that it came to be mandated upon EVERYONE.

You would know that if you knew your country's history or if you read the New Republic once in a while. Even at that time, it was a scheme that was meant to cheat people as the retirement age and average American life expectancy almost mirrored each other. The country was coming out of the greatest depression and the greatest war ever known and not many people were expected to live beyond 65 to start collecting their retirement checks..

Honestly Gmay I don't what your big fear of the government holding this money is. What other institution can even run this?
It is a sick joke that liberals like you suddenly become so venerable of "institutions". It is telling that you would call Government, an "institution" but i digress.

Here's some thing to wrap your head around, garage - there are people in this world, who don't think like you or want to toe the line on issues that you have no problems with.

For e.g. I dont need no fricking institution to tell me how i should plan my retirement. It is my life, i am an adult and i manage my finances daily... including my retirement!

It may surprise you but normal, responsible people actually plan for retirement. And THEY are the best judges of their financial situation, their financial needs, retirement planning etc.

The worst part of SS is the fact that it coerces you into coughing up money for some one else's retirement and then when you grow old, coerces the youth of that time to pay up for your retirement.

There are better and straight forward ways to do this- none of which involves the coercion of a leviathan central Government.

Interestingly, this post is originally about the evils of another ideology in which Government routinely uses coercion against its citizens all in the name of the common good. It is no surprise that for liberals, their differences with communism is not in kind, but in degree.

Garage, you obviously don't have any fundamental knowledge of what bonds are, what securities are, and what exactly their role is in the financial world. Your description of how the "Trust Fund" "works" demonstrates the joke the SS scheme is - one arm of the federal government is getting money/help from another arm of the federal govt !

so, where the hell does the US Treasury get its revenues from, inorder to pay this awesome trust fund when boomers retire? By either borrowing more or taxing people even more..

You seem to be the kind of person who does not care anything about "debt" or deficits or have no problem taxing people to death,who want NO PART in this Ponzi scheme; 9/18/10, 6:42 AM
Nagarajan Sivakumar said...: My bald faced stupid argument is working pretty well, and has been working pretty well since 1935.

@Garage,
You are pretty ignorant and it’s amazing that you show your stupidity to the whole world to see. Social Security did not start the way that it operates currently right now. It was created by FDR, but it was not until the late 40's that it came to be mandated upon EVERYONE.

You would know that if you knew your country's history. Even at that time, it was a scheme that was meant to cheat people as the retirement age and average American life expectancy almost mirrored each other. The country was coming out of the greatest depression and the greatest war ever known and not many people were expected to live beyond 65 to start collecting their retirement checks..

Honestly Gmay I don't what your big fear of the government holding this money is. What other institution can even run this?
It is a sick joke that liberals like you suddenly become so venerable of "institutions". It is telling that you would call Government, an "institution" but i digress.

Here's some thing to wrap your head around, garage - there are people in this world, who don't think like you or want to toe the line on issues that you have no problems with.

For e.g. I dont need no fricking institution to tell me how i should plan my retirement. It is my life, i am an adult and i manage my finances daily... including my retirement!

It may surprise you but normal, responsible people actually plan for retirement. And THEY are the best judges of their financial situation, their financial needs, retirement planning etc.

The worst part of SS is the fact that it coerces you into coughing up money for some one else's retirement and then when you grow old, coerces the youth of that time to pay up for your retirement.

There are better and straight forward ways to do this- none of which involves the coercion of a leviathan central Government.

Interestingly, this post is originally about the evils of another ideology in which Government routinely uses coercion against its citizens all in the name of the common good. It is no surprise that for liberals, their differences with communism is not in kind, but in degree.; 9/18/10, 6:44 AM
Nagarajan Sivakumar said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 9/18/10, 6:46 AM
Nagarajan Sivakumar said...: Garage, you obviously don't have any fundamental knowledge of what bonds are,what exactly their role is in the financial world. Your description of how the "Trust Fund works" demonstrates the joke the SS scheme is - one arm of the federal government is getting money/help from another arm of the federal govt !

so, where the hell does the US Treasury get its revenues, in order to pay this awesome trust fund when boomers retire?

By either borrowing more or taxing people even more..

You seem to be the kind of person who does not care anything about debt,or deficits or have no problem taxing people to death,who want to have NO PART in this Ponzi scheme; 9/18/10, 6:53 AM
Nagarajan Sivakumar said...: Treasury bonds historically have had the highest credit ratings and are considered one of the safest assets in the world. Of course it won't be solvent forever, it will certainly need to be tweaked, as it has successfully already.

Spoken like a true statist…er.. liberal… what happened in 1935 MUST definitely happen in 2035 also !! Because, you see the US Government has always had 35 million senior citizens to whom it was paying a retirement check till the time they die….. and you see the US will ALWAYS be the most prosperous country in the world… have you not watched its wonderful economic might in the last 5 years !!

Treasury bonds wre being bought because people were reasonably confident that the US Government will actually pay off what it promised. But when the liabilities for a Government mounts and it suddenly has 40 million senior citizens for whom it needs to pay retirement checks till the time they die IN ADDITION to funding the rest of a leviathan Government machinery, things don’t look pretty any more.

In order to see this, you need to have some intellectual honesty, Garage Mahal. But you are statist ideologue who clings on to anachronisms like Social Security and you would want your Government to borrow to any extent to keep this ponzi scheme going and then coerce its own citizens through high taxes to any extent in order to pay that borrowed money with interest.; 9/18/10, 6:54 AM
Nagarajan Sivakumar said...: Here’s a deal to liberals like Garage – you being the party of “choice” and all that – why don’t you like the idea of individuals choosing to opt out of Social Security? Of course people who do so will manage their retirement on their own and get zero SS benefits when they retire

And for people like Garage who are so over awed by this great institution called the Federal Government, they pay Social Security taxes and they trust their benevolent Govt to hold their money till they turn 65,68 or what ever age the Government mandates and start repaying them again?

Every one wins and there is no coercion involved. But this would unfortunately expose the bitter fact that most people don’t need Govt’s help with their retirement or finances and they are being unnecessarily coerced into it at gun point by their benevolent do gooder overlords.; 9/18/10, 6:57 AM
Nagarajan Sivakumar said...: I am sorry that i am late to the debate on social security - full disclosure, i lived and worked in this wonderful country for almost 10 years - returned to India back in early Jan of this year.

I received a letter from Social Security Administration in 2008 that i had paid about 16,000$ into the system and that my employer had "matched" that amount... of course no such "matching" happened - employers routinely pass of their Social Security "obligations" to their employees, by reducing the annual SS amount they have to "pay" from the employees base salary - this happens when they are hired or when they get promotions.

Another example of how Social Security is ultimately making employees poorer - if i had a choice, i would never ever get into this Ponzi scheme.; 9/18/10, 7:06 AM
Michael said...: Garage's perception of finance mirrors the administrations: Just as the stimulus is a success if only 2 million people in the entire country keep jobs so too is Social Security a success as long as the Govt. pays SS recipients, even if no other Govt. service has operating capital.

Very simple when you employ the fungible to your arguments.; 9/18/10, 7:17 AM
Pigilito said...: The rage of the state when people don't do what is expected of them can be terrible. The lesson to be pulled from this is never to let governments be in charge of every aspect of our lives.; 9/18/10, 7:38 AM
pious agnostic said...: Mao will never survive politically a revelation of this magnitude. His brand will be damaged irrevocably.

I predict he'll resign within the month.; 9/18/10, 7:39 AM
Anonymous said...: people, many of them young or REALLY stupid, still hoist the communist banner without thinking about the MILLIONS of people who died

At my 20 year college reunion (i.e., with people who were not young), one classmate was rolling his eyes over his Chinese co-worker who was unhappy with the Mao poster hanging in his office. The other people talking to him agreed the Chinese woman was over-reacting and she should just chill. I bit my lip and walked away, thinking this was not the time to get into a political argument, but now I wish I had said something to those idiots.; 9/18/10, 8:33 AM
AllenS said...: Class,

They would have rolled their eyes at you, too. Or called you a teabagger or hillbilly or right-wing nut or idiot or...; 9/18/10, 8:38 AM
garage mahal said...: Garage's perception of finance mirrors the administrations: Just as the stimulus is a success if only 2 million people in the entire country keep jobs so too is Social Security a success as long as the Govt. pays SS recipients, even if no other Govt. service has operating capital.

This doesn't make any sense. Like most conservative arguments in the age of Obama. Nuts.; 9/18/10, 9:01 AM
GMay said...: garage mahal dodged again: "Correct. By a mile. Because SS alone doesn't service 100% our our total debt obligations! It was never designed to. I don't know anyone that claimed it was, or supposed to. You're veering into some eco-birther weirdness here. The wheels are coming off."

I'm sorry you consider basic understanding of government debt structure to be some sort of whacko conspiracy theory, but then again, you didn't even know what a bond was and you're a leftist.

And I'm not really sorry sorry. It just seemed the thing to say.; 9/18/10, 9:26 AM
GMay said...: garage mahal admitted: "This doesn't make any sense. Like most conservative arguments in the age of Obama. Nuts."

This doesn't make sense to you because you obviously don't understand the subject material.

But you're an Obama Nut, so it's not surprising you're stepping all over your dick here.; 9/18/10, 9:29 AM
Chris said...: *unison* "the greater good"; 9/18/10, 9:41 AM
garage mahal said...: I'm sorry you consider basic understanding of government debt structure to be some sort of whacko conspiracy theory, but then again, you didn't even know what a bond was and you're a leftist.

I don't understand what a bond is? Haha. You denied the existence of 2.5 trillion worth of them! You emphatically denied there was a surplus. I linked to the Trustees Report, and you still believe it doesn't exist. You may as well be arguing that we didn't land on the moon. You've been fed this lie for so long that you just can't believe it's a lie. The more you are shown it is a lie, the more you believe it is.; 9/18/10, 10:14 AM
I'm Full of Soup said...: Garage believes that if he pays himself a $1Milllion dollars from his business and deposits the check right back into his business account that he has made a $1 Million dollars. Tell you what Garage- go to the bank, explan that transaction to them and try to get them to make you a loan based on the $1 Million deal you just did! Because that is what the Trust Fund is - the govt takes your money, pays it to someone else and the govt says - "Don't worry, we recorded the debt in our 100% safe Trust Fund"; 9/18/10, 5:52 PM
I'm Full of Soup said...: And by taking the social sec money from the young workers and not recording that liability, it makes our deficit look smaller! What a great country!; 9/18/10, 5:54 PM
Jum said...: A commenter above asked if anyone was old enough to remember all the kids with their "little red books" of Chairman Mao's sayings.

What I remember is that virtually all of those little-red-book-wavers were getting student deferments from the draft, and were marching against the Vietnam War. By way of comparison for those of you who weren't there in the 60's, the nastiness and vehemence of the MoveOn/Cindy Sheehan wing of the Iraq anti-war movement, for all its ugliness, was nothing compared to the vitriol of the students protesting the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam protesters hated not just the war - many, many of them hated the soldiers who were sent to fight it. It was routine for troops coming back into the US after having served their tours in Vietnam to be met by groups of citizens waiting for them. Not to congratulate them, or thank them for their sacrifices. No these were "student protesters", who were there to curse and scream at the returning warriors.

It was no urban legend, and don't let anyone try to change history around you, because starting around 1967 and continuing until the war ended, it happened hundreds of times: soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines were spit on, screamed at, called "babykillers", and in some cases literally had urine and feces thrown on them by these "student protesters".

What was even worse, was the fact of telephone calls to the families of scores upon scores of young men killed in action in Vietnam. These poor, grieving people were called within a day or two of the notice of the death of their sons having appeared in the news. An anonymous young person told them how happy the caller was that their son was dead; that it "served him right" because he went to be "a babykiller" in Vietnam. Some callers would even say they hoped the dead sons suffered horribly before they died. "Student protesters" were proud of how they tormented the bereft parents, because to them, the parents "deserved it." Just consider for a moment what combination of narcissism, sense of entitlement and lack of empathy it takes for one human to make a call like that to another.

Why do I bring all this old history up? I want to remind everyone what became of the "student protesters" of the Vietnam War. A surprising number of them went into academia. A good many others hired in to bureaucratic jobs in various government agencies. So today those same protesters who cursed soldiers, are greatly over-represented in our university faculties and administrations, as well as in the management of our state and federal government agencies.

Those people (many of whom called for the military victory of communist North Vietnam, and the military defeat of the US, and were thus literally "on the other side") have taught...rather, I should say "indoctrinated"...two generations of college students. Others have burrowed safely and permanently into the innermost mechanism of our state and federal governments. Only now are they beginning to retire as they Baby Boomers begin reaching 65.

Remember this. Remember every time you see a clip of some gray-haired professor railing against a "genocidal" US policy, that 40 years ago that same braying ass was almost certainly waving Mao's little red book, cursing our soldiers, and telling grieving parents that he was glad their beloved son's body lay blown to atoms across some stinking rice paddy in Vietnam.

Remember who these people were; remember who they became.; 9/18/10, 10:45 PM
GMay said...: garage,

Sorry I missed the rest of yesterday and this morning and I know there's no way in hell you'll be back here.

But I didn't deny the existence of bonds (and I dare you to show where I did), but you did divulge your ignorance of what a bond is. I also explained to you (as did a few others) as to how those bonds fit into the government's debt structure and their net effect in relation to the total public debt outstanding to show you how the surplus is a fantasy in your uninformed mind.

I'll catch you on another thread.; 9/19/10, 12:39 PM