Factor in that the majority of that net worth is in home valuations

and that those are also artificially inflated in order to maintain the technical solvency of the banks...

...round and round she goes...



This was my 11,000th post. Where did my life go so wrong?

No and yes and why the government should not be involved in religious rites at all.

Polyamory is a perfectly valid choice, but the legalities of marriage, born out of religious doctrine, turn the consensual agreement into a vehicle of enforceable servitude and form of commerce.

Thus, we end up with obscenities like the FLA being defended in the name of freedom.

Yes, but you are in the one business that we've considered and rejected time and time again,

so I'm not sure how much of our experience is valid in your very competitive and finicky business. We just rejected a little Bistro we were thinking about buying because it was one of those once-in-a-decade opportunities that you just have to look at. It is almost perfect in every respect, but in the end it is still a restaurant and will still require lots of hard work, very long hours, and constant supervision.

Generally, I avoid employees like the plague as the number of problems in a business increases exponentially with employees. Once you hire one, you come under the authority of innumerable agencies, regulations, and laws that increase costs and hinder your actions. I've always built businesses on a partnership model (I call it the law firm model). Doing it this way, I've certainly made less money for myself but everybody has made far more overall, and that's one of the factors that has always attracted buyers when I'm ready to move on to the next thing.

Turnover can wipe out your bottom line and the only businesses that run with high turnover for long are those that exploit their workers. The more skill required, the worse it gets. OTOH, it usually takes more than money to keep good people in a dynamic employment environment like food & beverage. One thing I've found to help this is to make good employees out of average employees. It takes longer and costs more, but I think the returns are sufficient justification and when those inevitable and unforeseeable disasters strike, they are the people that will go above and beyond helping you get through it.

K&R As usual, Douglas Adams was right.

"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."

The people that don't get this either haven't spent much time with animals or don't get a lot of things.

Poverty is the price of opulence. n/t

They had the benefits given them because of things their parents did, they took these

benefits to improve their own lives, and then pulled the ladder up behind them, denying them to their own kids. They got the free/low cost education, they grew up with access to health care, they grew up in cites and towns that had, supported, and recognized the value of the commons.

The Hippies were right, but not very many of them were ever really Hippies. Most of them were the arrogant, greedy, short-sighted fools that eagerly cut their own throats in the mistaken belief that they would never face any of the consequences of their actions. As adults, they did exactly what they did in their youth, take it, break it, and leave it for someone else to deal with. And as for the generation unfortunate enough to immediately follow them, well we got a lifetime of ill-used leftovers and the bills for their party,

Theirs is the generation that stopped looking up and turned inward.

You've perfectly described the desired perception of the game.

The "values" of the houses were going up because of the legalized financial crimes that were made legal so that the parasites wouldn't have to take the losses they created in the financial markets. There never were real market forces (demand outstripping supply) driving the prices up, the prices were driven up by the prospect of collecting fees and leveraging the debt created by the transaction.

Tens of millions more losers were made in The Greatest Robbery in History than won even a little bit and literally everybody that still earns a paycheck, or will for decades to come, be paying off the winners... unless there is another collapse... the game isn't over...

Both better and worse of course, but from a historical perspective the last half

century has become worse for more Americans. Picking 1963 is a good choice as it was a decisive year in the turmoil that was growing due to rising tensions amongst a wide range of factions.

It is far better today if you are gay, it is far better if you are a woman, it is worse for all men that don't belong to the parasite class, worse still if you are a man other than white, and much, much worse if you are a kid. Health care is better, if you have access to it, but it is much worse overall for most people since it has been converted from a social responsibility into a salable commodity owned by the parasite class.

Life is much worse for the people that built this nation through hard work, innovation, tenacity, and skilled labor as all of these assets have virtually no value any longer.

And perhaps the biggest, and most destructive change has been the perversion of the American mind. The foundations of what being an American meant 50 years ago have all but disappeared.

We are much, much less thoughtful and meaner than we once were, and while there have always been those with little or no education, today we have something approaching a majority of complete ignoramuses that believe they are educated and possess an understanding of the workings or the world that they, in fact, utterly lack. We have accepted a complete, media created fantasy as reality and have become so ignorant of reality that when the fantasy fails (because it is a fantasy, duh), we are at a loss to understand why it failed.

50 years ago America was a nation coming into a time of change and the accompanying turmoil with a strong trajectory toward being better. Today America is a nation in a time of change and the accompanying turmoil with a strong trajectory toward getting worse.

Superficially, no it wasn't. but there is a fundamental yes underlying that time.

1963 was not a really good time to be anything in America but a white male, preferably a veteran, but the trend was toward improvement, Women, blacks, draftees etc., were at the breaking point and five years later the nation was in flames. By 1983 things were much better for women, but the trend had reversed, quite quickly and quite deliberately.

Long before they funded the teahaddists, they were also among the who's who of

funding sources for Al From's Democratic Leadership Counsel. Kochs, Coors, Chevron, Merk, the list goes on and on, created the DLC to do just what it's done, remake the Democratic Party in the image of the republican Party. Could that be why the DLC has tried so hard for so long to keep its financial sources "private"? Of course it is.

But a bunch of reporters (remember what those were), after digging for over a decade began to unearth some of the names. For anyone interested in verifying it, it's not going to be easy, because, quite coincidentally I'm sure, the stories listed in your web searches have frequently been "removed, renamed, or deleted" from site after site. The most recent one that I'm aware of was written by Bill Berkowitz.