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MarcusAureliusII

Listed below are comments made by MarcusAureliusII between Friday, 27th November 2009 and Saturday, 28th November 2009 (2 Hours Ago) .

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Dublin child abuse report published 6:25pm on 28 Nov 2009 As I understand accounts of the report (not having read it myself), not all of the abusers were priests, not all of the abuse sexual or even physical. Of those that were sexual, it wasn't clear what percentage of them were homosexual and what percentage were heterosexual.

It was interesting how many Hollywood left wingers and Europeans were incensed at the capture and deportation of the film maker Roman Polanski recently, the fugitive from American law for three decades who raped a young girl. Somehow they felt that with the passage of time, the system should have forgiven him. But many of the crimes reported here were decades ago. I just wrote it off as the typical left wing and European double standard.
Dublin child abuse report published 6:09pm on 28 Nov 2009 Don't know what posting #8 lifting a paragraph directly from my #2 is about. Seems objectionable to merely copy it with a link to something I never heard of from someone I never heard of.

I think the church has been lucky so far. Nothing like the villagers hunting down the villain in the Boris Karloff Movie Frankenstein with tourches in their hands, blood in their eyes, and revenge on their minds. In the US we have the civil courts and the criminal prosecution systems for redress of wrongs. What will they use in Ireland?
Europe's top jobs 1:06pm on 28 Nov 2009 SB, If you are not wanted by the police for a crime, and I assume you are not, the door to America is always unlocked from the inside. If you envy the Brits so much, there is nothing stopping you from going to Britain, living there, even eventually becoming a British citizen. I'm not certain but I think you can now have dual citizenship which is a law we have passed that I just don't understand. In the past, to become an American citizen you had to renounce all allegiance to any and every foreign nation. I think that is how it should always be.

The situation the US government finds itself in, 10 trillion in debt, one to two of which is debt to the government of China is not unique when taking the size of the economy into account. We've been in this kind of financial problem before. The solution of course, the only solution that works and inevitably will have to be used again is to print vast sums of money. This will send shock waves around the world. It will devalue our currency, drive interest rates through the roof, crash the stock and bond markets. It will also destroy banks and other lenders creating severe impact on foreign economies. The benefit of course is that it will allow both the US government and private individual Americans to pay off debt with very cheap easy to obtain dollars essentially establishing a new and different equilibrium. In the past, this has been done every time there's been a recession since the great depression, in fact it is how we really got out of the depression. The war just forced the government to spend large sums of money it didn't have. But the magnitude is so great, I think the best way to go about it is not gradually as we've done previously but as a one time shot, say about an 80% devaluation. The mechanism would be to put vast sums of money in the hands of Americans who could pay down their own debts while allowing the government to pay off much of its debt. In the long run there is no alternative because taxing the US public to get this money for the government will only turn the recession into an endless depression and taxing private industry only passes the tax along to the end consumer, the public as well. It is said that corporations don't pay taxes, they just collect them and this is true, those taxes are built into the price of all the goods and services they sell. Just look at any of your utilitiy bills if you don't believe it.

Protectionist taxation of imports would have brought jobs back to the US but the government didn't do that up to now. The government has made one concession to Americans in that American corporations must now pay tax on profits from overseas investments in the year those profits are realized. In the past they could defer those taxes by reinvesting overseas. This is one way the US encouraged American corporations to help make the rest of the world richer at American expense. There were of course many others. But once the currency is devalued, the price of imports will go through the roof unless and until foriegn countries devalue their currency as well and they will essentially be priced out of the American market. It's been happening already. If you don't believe it, just look at the price of imported cheese at your local supermarket. I don't know why anyone in America still buys it. Right now my private imported cheese to local beef index is at 300%, a record high. That is the price of the average imported European cheese to the price on sale of American Angus porterhouse steak.

Bankrupting the banks by paying them off with dollars that are twenty cents on the dollars they loaned doesn't bother me a bit. When those banks go broke as most of them likely will, new banks will be chartered without the burden of debt in the form of loans made on prior expensive dollars.

I wouldn't envy the Brits or any other European economies SB. They will be cracked like hollow eggshells when the real crash comes (we have't seen it yet) only next time they will not recover. I for one don't want to see Americans bail them out yet again the way we have in the past. They have lived far too well for far too long at our expense. The fact that they don't know it and won't believe it is among their greatest weaknesses. In a world of free trade and competition for markets and raw materials, they are on a par with the weakest economies in the world and are vulnerable to tides of every misfortune, malevolence, and carpricious whim from Russia to the Middle east, from Africa to China. In the long run they are doomed whether individually or as 27 drowning men hanging on to each other for dear life. Just think, one big blow up with Russia and when the gas is turned off again, they will freeze to death as their industries grind to a screeching halt. We on the other hand have with the exception of a few rare elements like chromium every resource necessary to be completely independent of the rest of the world and that especially includes monumental quantities of energy in the form of natural gas, coal, and uranium. There's even quite a bit of oil out there and I'm sure further exploration will uncover even more. What we need to do is brush aside environmentalists and the oil companies who have restricted access and use of it each for their own reasons.
Europe's top jobs 10:16pm on 27 Nov 2009 I think it is telling that those who thought about the future of Europe some decades ago and had the power to "guide" it decided that they had to create a geopolitical entity and therefore an economic entity comparable in size to the United States to challenge it or to prevent another war among themselves or ???? Why they felt this way isn't clear. But they saw that the only way to accomplish this goal was to sell it initially as ruse of a free trade zone whioh once sold to the populations of the more affluent countries could be taken out of direct public scrutiny and action by placing in the hands of rubber stamp parliaments. Later on smaller and poorer countries would join simply by being bribed. The breakup of the USSR and the end of its subsidies to otherwise impovrished Eastern European satellites and internal colonies could not have come at a more fortuitous time for them.

Of course in the end it will never work for many reasons but the process will carry forward until the day when it can no longer be held together even by the greatest of force. To those who think this unlikely or impossible it should be remembered that until the bitter end, we all saw the USSR the same way, a monolith that would last seemingly forever. And then one day like a bolt from the blue....
Europe's top jobs 8:44pm on 27 Nov 2009 rhwdj;

"If the Eastern European countries are becoming more democratic due to EU membership, this benefits the UK because it improves the UK's SECURITY interests. An unstable un-democratic state in Eastern Europe means the UK would have to spend money on its military, not to mention the potential lost of British lives due to any aggression by the undemocratic state."

Do you think the UK should be on guard in case undemocratic Belarus decides to march through Austria to get to London?
Europe's top jobs 6:23pm on 27 Nov 2009 frenchderek, Baroness Ashton will impliment the EU's foreign policy when Sarkozy and Merkel decide what it is and tell her or she will learn the meaning of real political power so fast it will make her head spin...until it points in the direction of the unemployment office.
Europe's top jobs 6:07pm on 27 Nov 2009 ignace, perhaps it's all for the best. After all, if the Brits don't trust their own elected leaders to devise just the right type and degree of regulation to optimize their markets between growth and security, who would know better that they are untrustworthy or incapable than the Brits themselves. Or in other matters of their governance as well for that matter. By ceding the power to govern, it has been handed over to people who have Britain's own best interests at heart...like French and Germans. And why should anyone be surprised or dismayed. The power to cede this authority to outsiders was inherent in the system of government Brits accepted all along. No need to allow Parliament to interfere. Gordon Brown after all is smart enough to know what he and his fellow British Parliamentarians can't handle among themselves.
Franco-German power 5:18pm on 27 Nov 2009 WA, 176 is correct. Must have pushed the wrong buttons on my calculator late last night (after a few drinks too.)

I highly recommend you see the movie starring Charles Laughton. He was the quintessential Henry VIII. A large hunk of meat in one hand, a big stein of ale in the other. But I don't have the hat or the robes, nor am I 350 pounds. Nevertheless.....a king is a king is a king is a king. As good as turkey can be, there are better things. Spare ribs for instance.

dt, the process of how to properly thaw out a frozen turkey seems to be important but I have no idea why. Anyway, my comments compared the recommended method and my method. The results from doing it my way tastes fine to me.

John Hovel;

I read the red line opt outs that were actually made available on the web. Forty odd pages of legal mumbo jumbo which had to be carefully parsed to figure out what they really meant. They didn't seem like opt outs at all. What they were amounted to a five year deferral after which the UK was required to comply with all of the provisions of the Constitution or face penalties without limit imposed by an EU tribunal on which it would not be a member. The term "opt-outs" was just one more ruse to make submission to a foreign dictatorship more palatable to the UK's population. The UK will get quite a lesson as a result I think. Selection of those foreigners who will decide its fate is just the beginning.
Europe's top jobs 5:00pm on 27 Nov 2009 Artiste;

"You see that's where we here in the UK are different to you guys over there we've been taught at schools that taking part is more important than winning"

That in itself is sufficient to explain why you always lose. From an empire on which the sun never set to a fifth rate colony of a third rate would be power cobbled together by some of the most corrupt self serving and inept criminals on earth in about 100 years, if that isn't losing I don't know what is. Rationalize it any way you like. I'm enjoying every headline of it. What's the difference who pulls the strings, when they tell the UK to jump all it can do is ask how high.
Is Obama serious about climate change? 3:17pm on 27 Nov 2009 Who the hell are Europeans or President Obama to tell me that I have to take a bus or a train when I want to drive a car or to drive an miserable little underpowered econobox when I can have a big comfortable high powered machine that will protect me in a crash with one of those semi-rigs barreling down the highway just so that people in China and India can increase their CO2 output and live more comfortable lives? That's what your European commissioners drive and they are no better than I am.

I will fight the criminal cap and trade carbon tax that would suck American dry. Instead I will push for increased exploration and exploitation of the vast reserves of oil in Alaska and elsewhere such as off shore, increased use of coal, and increased use of natural gas. Once we have enough oil and new oil refineries for our gasoline needs, we can turn farm land back into producing food so that we can get the price at the supermarket back to where it belongs. And the rest of the world can go kiss off.

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