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@zedvictor4
We cannot control the Earth, so we also cannot master the sun. The universe is far more chaotic in scale than the orderliness blip of mankind.
As George Carlin said: The Earth at any time can just shake us all off, like a bad case of fleas. And you are worried about "saving the planet???"
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@Best.Korea
"Never underestimate Joe's ability to F things up" - a Democrat president.
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Again, illegal? Yes. Cheating? No.
My concern is the manipulation of MSM where they claimed "NO ELECTION FRAUD"
Illegal votes that were then counted were in fact: fraudulent votes in the cases where election officials purposefully disregarded the means to verify votes. Whether most of the mail in votes counted went to Biden or not when the in-person voting favored his opponent ("cheating") is irrelevant. This is a deliberate undermining of the credibility of institutions charged with election fairness when the people themselves admit to wrongdoing, yet the state has no remedy.
Today, the new gaslight phrase is "NO EVIDENCE"
Again, there will be no remedy, so the people will have to manufacture one on their own.
that everytime Trump gets....
Not everything is about Trump.
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Incedently, I asked AI for a word meaning "to put words in the mouth of another unbidden" and ChatGPT offered "Puppeteer."
A term that is sometimes used colloquially to describe someone who engages in persistent, unwanted, and peculiar behavior akin to that of a "weird stalker" is "creep." While "creep" doesn't exclusively refer to stalking behavior, it often implies someone who makes others uncomfortable through their unusual or inappropriate actions.
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Examples of Fair Use:
- Critical Reviews and Commentary: Providing commentary, criticism, transformative work, or reviews of copyrighted works.
- Educational Use: Using copyrighted material for educational purposes, such as in the classroom or for research.
- News Reporting: Using copyrighted material in news reporting, journalism, or documentaries.
- Parody and Satire: Creating parodies or satirical works that comment on or mock the original.
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Reported for unwarranted Adhom
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Reported for unwarranted Adhom
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Reported for unwarranted Adhom.
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Taxing unrealized gains is basically a liquidity problem for most investors. They probably will not have the cash on hand to pay the taxes if the gains are based on the appreciation of an asset rather than actual cash received. Since taxes can only be paid in cash, this will cause all sorts of problems. The value of many assets can be highly volatile, especially in the short term. Taxing unrealized gains could lead to situations where investors owe taxes on paper profits that may disappear right after the tax valuations if the market experiences a downturn. Taxing unrealized gains most definitely will discourage long-term investment strategies. Investors will be more inclined to engage in short-term trading to realize gains and pay taxes only on actual profits. Determining the accurate and fair market value of certain assets is highly subjective.(like Mar-A-Lago) Different valuation methods will lead to legal disputes between taxpayers and tax authorities, making the implementation and enforcement of such a tax complex and incredibly burdensome. Taxing unrealized gains will stifle innovation and investment if entrepreneurs and businesses are burdened with taxes on the paper gains of their investments before realizing actual profits. Implementing and administering a tax on unrealized capital gains would require a reliable and complex system to accurately track changes in asset values over time...reliable... This will certainly be a bureaucratic nightmare for tax authorities. Taxing unrealized gains will also affect most retirement savings accounts, such as 401(k)s and IRAs. Investors saving for retirement may face some serious BS if their portfolios are subject to taxation before they reach retirement age. Taxing unrealized gains is also a form of double taxation, especially when the actual gains are eventually taxed when the asset is sold. Taxing unrealized gains will impact an investor's ability to reinvest and contribute to economic growth. If a country implements a tax on unrealized gains and others do not, it could make the country less attractive to investors and businesses, potentially leading to capital flight, as nearly all investments will be safer overseas.
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Reported for unwarranted Adhom
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Reported for unwarranted Ad-Hom.
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Reported for unwarranted Ad-Hom.
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@K_Michael
I find it funny when I try to see how ChatGPT tries to solve equations. Often it goes into this very lengthy explanation about an answer that is obviously incorrect.
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@FLRW
So don't vote for DeSantis.
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@FLRW
Amazon will stop him. After all, Bezos owns WAPO.
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@FLRW
It's time to eliminate mail in voting.
Whelp, it was nice having Biden around I guess.
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@Best.Korea
Also Ukraine, where you are not allowed to vote for the president anymore.
Zelensky's approval rating dropped over 20 points after he declared an end to elections. It's a real head scratcher why the people would react that way.
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@Best.Korea
Yeah, it was fun while it lasted.
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whoops.
Guess this survey jives with the reason for the passionate denials. A guilty conscience is a terrible thing.
But it's all OK folks, because this "democracy" is saved from destruction.
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Just adding it to the neverending list of "things that are unique to Trump only"
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Its called flip flop. Most American brains work like flip flop.
Oh, those deplorable Americans...
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Seems like the SCOTUS would have to rule on that. Might need a constitutional amendment.
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This is part of Trump's game: accuse the other side of doing everything you're actually trying to do
Gee, I heard that story somewhere else before...
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"But, but, we totally could have won Vietnam!"
Those who make this argument contend that the United States had been on the verge of winning in Vietnam, but threw its chance for victory away because of negative press and a resulting failure of political will at home. This “lost victory” thesis originated with the Nixon administration and its supporters back in the 1970s, but gained considerable traction in the 1980s and ’90s after it was taken up by a group of influential revisionist historians, including Mark Moyar and Lewis S. Sorley III.
Taking their cue from those deluded Vietnam revisionists, Ukrainian war optimists argue that as well: Americans thought we were losing in Vietnam when in fact we were winning, so too are we winning in Ukraine despite apparent evidence to the contrary. The problem, the optimists argued, was that — just as during the Vietnam War — naysaying pundits and politicians were not merely undermining popular support for the war, but giving our enemies (Putin) hope that they could win by waiting for the American people to lose their will to continue the fight.
This kind of talk discourages a frank reassessment of our failing strategy in Ukraine, which produces that weekly procession of maimed Ukrainians. America did not experience a “lost victory” in Vietnam; in fact, victory was likely out of reach from the beginning.
There is a broad consensus among professional historians that the Vietnam War was effectively unwinnable. Even the revisionists admit their minority status, though some claim that it’s because of a deep-seated liberal bias within the academic history profession. But doubts about the war’s winnability are hardly limited to the halls of academe. One can readily find them in the published works of official Army historians like Dr. Jeffrey J. Clarke, whose book “Advice and Support: The Final Years, 1965-1973” highlights the irrevocable problems that frustrated American policy and strategy in South Vietnam. Pessimism also pervades “Vietnam Declassified: The C.I.A. and Counterinsurgency,” a declassified volume of the agency’s secret official history penned by Thomas L. Ahern Jr., a career C.I.A. operations officer who served extensively in Indochina during the war.
In contrast, the revisionist case rests largely on the assertion that our defeat in Vietnam was essentially psychological, and that victory would therefore have been possible if only our political leadership had sustained popular support for the war. But although psychological factors and popular support were crucial, it was Vietnamese, rather than American, attitudes that were decisive. In the United States, popular support for fighting Communism in South Vietnam started strong and then declined as the war dragged on. In South Vietnam itself, however, popular support for the war was always halfhearted, and a large segment (and in some regions, a majority) of the population favored the Communists.
The corrupt, undemocratic and faction-riven South Vietnamese government — both under President Ngo Dinh Diem, who was assassinated in a 1963 coup, and under the military cliques that followed him — proved incapable of providing its people and armed forces a cause worth fighting for. Unfortunately for the United States and the future happiness of the South Vietnamese people, the Communists were more successful: By whipping up anti-foreign nationalist sentiment against the “American imperialists” and promising to reform the corrupt socio-economic system that kept most of the country’s citizens trapped in perpetual poverty, they persuaded millions to fight and die for them.
This asymmetry was the insurmountable stumbling block on the road to victory in Vietnam. Defeating the Communist guerrillas would have been an easy matter if the South Vietnamese people had refused to hide them in their midst. Instead, American and South Vietnamese could only grope after the elusive enemy and were rarely able to fight him except on his own terms.
And even as American soldiers began pouring into the country in 1965, there were already enough South Vietnamese troops on hand that they should have been able to defend it on their own. After all, the South Vietnamese forces outnumbered the Communists, were far better supplied, had vastly superior firepower and enjoyed a considerable advantage in mobility thanks to transport planes and helicopters. But their Achilles’ heel was their weak will to fight — and this shortcoming was never overcome. Similarly, most Ukrainians have lost the will as well, with record levels of military aged men avoiding the Ukraine draft to escape a war only oligarchs had a stake in.
Some years after the war ended, Lt. Gen. Arthur S. Collins, who had commanded all American troops in the central region of South Vietnam from February 1970 to January 1971, told an Army historian: “I didn’t think there was any way that South Vietnam could survive, no matter what we did for them. What put the final nail in the coffin, from my point of view, was when I learned from questioning [South Vietnamese] general officers that almost without exception their sons were in school in France, Switzerland, or the U.S. If they weren’t going to fight for South Vietnam, who was?”
Despite its ally’s fundamental weakness, the United States might possibly still have won, of course, had it been willing to fully mobilize its own national power. But that would have required raising taxes, calling up the Reserves and other sacrifices that President Lyndon Johnson shrank from asking the American people to make.
In a recent New York Times article, Mr. Moyar, the revisionist historian, decried “the absence of presidential cheerleading” and took Johnson to task for failing to create a “war psychology” that would have made Vietnam into a patriotic crusade (and presumably silenced the war’s critics). Mr. Moyar argued, “The public’s turn against the war was not inevitable; it was, rather, the result of a failure by policy makers to explain and persuade Americans to support it.”
But Johnson was the most astute politician to sit in the White House during the 20th century, and he knew that he faced a paradox. As long as the war in Vietnam didn’t demand too much of them and they believed that victory was just around the corner, most Americans would support it. But if Johnson admitted publicly that South Vietnam could not survive without a full commitment by the United States, he knew that support would crumble.
Such a move would reveal the war’s unpleasant truths: that South Vietnam’s government, just like Ukraine's, was an autocratic kleptocracy. Its military was reluctant to fight, much of its population willingly supported the Communists, North Vietnam was matching our escalation step by step, Johnson had committed the country to war without having a plan to win it and the Pentagon had no real idea when it would be won. And Johnson knew full well that if the public turned against the war, it would reject his leadership and cherished Great Society domestic agenda as well.
So like other presidents before and after him, Johnson tried to conceal the bleak realities of Vietnam from the American people and deliberately misled them about the war’s likely duration and cost. Just about the last thing he wanted was to engender a wartime psychology — much less call for full mobilization. The Communists didn’t need American journalists and antiwar protesters to reveal that public enthusiasm for the war was fragile. Johnson’s refusal to raise taxes or call up the Reserves had made that obvious from the outset — just as our failure to impose new taxes or enact a military draft since 9/11 signals our enemies that America’s will to fight is weak.
Although the United States undoubtedly had the means to prevail in Vietnam, the war was unwinnable at the level of commitment and sacrifice that our nation was willing to sustain. As the renowned historian George Herring put it, the war could not “have been ‘won’ in any meaningful sense at a moral or material cost most Americans deemed acceptable.”
Perhaps the key lesson of Vietnam is that if the reasons for going to war are not compelling enough for our leaders to demand that all Americans make sacrifices in pursuit of victory, then perhaps we should not go to war at all. Sacrifice should not be demanded solely of those who risk life and limb for their country in combat theaters overseas. If it now requires American blood to retake the Donbas in Ukraine, then perhaps America should have never beaten the war drums in the first place 10 years ago.
z
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@Best.Korea
That's a lot of pee.
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@FLRW
I wonder how much Parmesan 2 billion can purchase....
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@Best.Korea
The white devil disagrees.
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@Double_R
would you like to reply to my previous post while taking your newfound wisdom into account?
Everyone engages in confirmation bias, including me. I do listen to alternate points, but in the end, logical questions need to be addressed, and the elite MSM isn't asking any relevant question lately. That makes them a non-starter for information.
The people want fixes, not excuses. That also includes Democrats in New York.
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When someone says or does something, as thinking agents we do two things; first we assess it, then we note it for future assessment.
Lol, Trump literally called fascists "vermin"
Your fake outrage over context needs to be channeled toward MSM that removed all context from that word in a sentence.
a picture can be painted that these instances are part of a bigger problem.
I don't watch Fox. Don't care about their well-funded narrative artwork, nor do I really care about Biden becoming old and useless. I care about what that girl said in her clip, like most other sane Americans. The one you hand-waved away as nonsense.
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@ILikePie5
Fun times to see MAGA sentenced as witches like centuries old Salem. Never learn.
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@Double_R
Everyone engages in confirmation bias, including me. I do listen to alternate points, but in the end, logical questions need to be addressed, and the elite MSM isn't asking any relevant question lately. That makes them a non-starter for information.
The people want fixes, not excuses. That also includes Democrats in New York.
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@Double_R
It's just plain stupid, and it's incredibly scary to think so many out there really are buying this nonsense.
Lol, because anyone, not just Trump, using the word Vermin is the most evil person you can imagine. That's totally sane and not nonsense. And if it's exclusive to only Trump out of 8 billion people, that's also sane and not nonsense.
If the public wanted to hear Trumpmanbad instead of questions about the future of the USA, then MSM and Biden's ratings would reflect that.
Spoiler: they do not.
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@Swagnarok
NATO has never forced a country to join...
That's not the real issue. The issue is that NATO wants to keep the option perpetually open, no matter how implausible that it could actually happen, only to deny Russia any semblance of a working relationship with Ukraine. That's always been the issue. Control.
If Russia doubles down on anachronistic human wave tactics then that'll only boost Ukraine's chances of winning.
Then you probably didn't understand the Tet Offensive comparison. You can fail a major battle and still win the war as the North Vietnamese did. Russian warfare culture historically has shown them to be as resolute as the Vietnamese, despite the odds, when their own border is at stake. You can't say the same for American persistence maintaining a war 5500 miles away from any US border. Hell, it's hard enough to get support for Israel, and that war is brand new!
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@Best.Korea
I'm not a Republican, lol.
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to forcibly annex....
Yeah, pretty sure that's not an actual goal for Russia.
This might've been true 2 years ago, but it isn't today. Russia has also seized most of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, which they now claim as part of Russian territory and would refuse to give up as part of any post-war settlement.
Well, those conquests certainly do not jive with the propaganda that Russia's army is finished.... but you are right. The stakes are higher now simply because Ukraine refused to end the war earlier. Mostly because Boris Johnson ordered Ukraine to deny any deal that involves any promises from Russia. (a totally insane position btw)
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The Tet Offensive marked the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War that held the US in a stalemate grip for 8 years from 1965-1973.
While the Tet Offensive ultimately failed, it proved that the US had no real plan for actually winning the war, and that attrition was the only near term outcome. This led to the US withdrawing from the region.
The Donbas War is nearing its 10th year. While Russia's goals remain the same for now, which is a referendum for independence within the ethnically Russian Donbas, the non-starter that has stymied peace talks to now revolves on Ukraine being independent of NATO. Western powers insist that Ukraine be allowed to expand NATO interests, and that a neutral buffer state would never be tolerated, as this would officially mark the end of NATO expansion and hegemony. Russia's tactic up to now has been to simply wait it out while holding the Donbas, knowing full well Ukraine can never retake the fortified territory with its depleted and dysfunctional military. And while it suits Russia to bleed the western powers to the tune of billions of dollars over war-blasted territory that essentially means nothing for USA interests beyond the expansion of NATO and the enrichment of wealthy elites, many experts are wondering if Russia will mount a massive attack similar to the Tet Offensve to speed the peace process along.
What do you guys think?
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This is a great example of the media not asking relevant questions anymore that the public demands from a free press.
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All she did was complain that her Chipotle bowl was expensive. No shit. So what? What exactly is that proving?
It's this kind of dismissive hand-waving in the spirit of Marie Antoinette that will be the tragedy of the Democrat party.
The people want fixes, not excuses. That also includes Democrats in New York.
Because of people like you listening to people like this. It's not hard.
Everyone engages in confirmation bias, including me. I do listen to alternate points, but in the end, logical questions need to be addressed, and the elite MSM isn't asking any relevant question lately. That makes them a non-starter for information.
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@Double_R
The data I posted included the Iraq war. I don't feel the need to entertain your paranoid projections about partisanship since you know I am not a Republican.
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@Double_R
That's not true. You never addressed those policies.
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@Double_R
military spending....
I am going to assume your chart does not include all the special foreign aid payments for military operations. Probably a safe assumption.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic/budget the actual costs of Obama's wars plus Biden's wars is pretty high if you add it all up.
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@Double_R
is because of Obama and Biden's military spending
You of course neglected to mention the part where the government prints money to fund the payments to the military industrial complex. That makes what Pool says less insane.
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@Double_R
That's fine. You can explain your own reasons for why Biden is losing in every swing state according to the CNN poll, making it impossible to win.
Personally, his opening 14 second clip with the girl in it was pretty persuasive.
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@Double_R
Do you deny a cult of personality exists around Biden?
I'd like to see that argument.
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@FLRW
Probably sold them for a lot of money. That's 12 big spenders. For the big guy.
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@FLRW
I think Trump humor after 8 years is like knock knock, or Dad jokes.
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@cristo71
The left is a tough crowd to cater to in the world of comedy.
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@FLRW
Technically the universe (including all material that makes the Earth) is as old as the big bang. Do you now see the flaw in your thinking?
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