BC

Of course there is: President Clinton's 1993 Economic Plan included $255 billion in spending cuts over five years. Congress can cut future spending an...

Foreign aid (think USAID) has been unpopular for decades, mostly because of a gross misunderstanding. Polls reveal that quite a few people think forei...

Could've, would've, should've. Totalitarianism and fascism are both bad, in the same way tuberculosis and AIDS are both bad but different, and you can...

Yes, it is. Musk has gained access to the Federal Government's financial "Holy of Holies" -- the Federal Payment System. The barbarians have breached ...

Characterizing USAID as a criminal enterprise or radical lunatics is unusually appalling. NGO's that contract with USAID to carry out programs in Afri...

Who got the wheelbarrow?

More reasons why "nothing fails like prayer".

One reason we are not going to do better than all those who have preceded us is that 2000 years of thinking and believing have washed up on our shores...

According to Google's AI, "AI can sometimes achieve higher diagnostic accuracy than physicians when presented with case reports or patient information...

:100:

I too prefer toast and butter and haven't found a cause for which dying seemed like a good idea. In the last few decades, the practice of valorizing s...

Thanks! Very much so. Fascism has also been characterized as "a style" -- by which I do not mean a mere preference for brown shirts and goose stepping...

Had FDR waiting until Pearl Harbor to prepare for a war that was already well underway in Europe and Asia at the end of 1941, we would have had one he...

When I look for fascistic features I generally don't look at social security, unemployment insurance, public works programs, and the like as examples....

Welcome to TPF. We can judge the performance of a motor itself while setting aside circumstances and intent (which motors are not supposed to have). I...

Possible, but I don't know whether it is or not. Just guessing, it is salvageable. Each of Paxton's fascist characteristics might apply in some degree...

I'm sorry, but your statement triggered a mental reflex: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sure. I'm familiar with these methods of seeing the earth's curve. There's also the curved shadow of the earth during an eclipse. Several someone else...

Just "Because" by McCarthy and Lennon: Because the world is round it turns me on. I have no personally obtained evidence that the world is round or th...

Does Esperanto have categorically imperative verbs?

My phone always says "who are you?" in a hostile tone. Perhaps I was never who I thought I was.

As Kant said, "Nothing straight was ever built with the crooked timber of mankind."

And now a ski lift has collapsed in Northern Spain. Hey, wait: Don't blame Spain. It might very well be the fault of the French or the Germans.

Not just in Spain -- the same damned neoliberal policy was pursued in the US, beginning with New England manufacturing moving to cheaper southern stat...

Boyband or the Highwaymen (country super group), I liked listening to them both.

IN order not to totally derail Javi's castigation of Spain's decrepit economy, here's a lefty American folk song which is applicable to agriculture in...

I really am glad you are familiar with labor songs such as this and that you posted it. But Panopticon's recording sucks! What screwy method was used ...

Rural people in Asia weren't born knowing how to manufacture microchips. A lot of the labor on the factory floor isn't immensely complicated. Very hig...

There have been various schemes to build big high-tech factories in the industrial midwest of this country. Some have succeeded, many never saw the li...

This is true everywhere. Metal is indispensable--not just for our advanced civilization, such as it is, but civilization at all. Somehow the ecologist...

Spain does have a tourist industry, which means service employees, and sadly they don't get paid a lot. Spain also produces quite a lot of agricultura...

Hey, Javi, things could be much worse than you think they are! Every country has disreputable episodes in its history, bar none. Might as well blame i...

China is probably willing to use military force (aka war) to force Taiwan into union with the PRC. True, Taiwan produces a large share of advanced chi...

Right; a group of armed Fascists for Jesus seizing the White House shouldn't have free speech / freedom of religion defense in court. However, they wo...

British, French, American (et al) activities in the Middle East have triggered reactions among various ethnic and religious groups--not least among th...

Taking all the feasible steps up the chain of command might well be an exercise in futility. Or not. It depends. Revolutionaries might rather just sho...

Very steam punk! Big steam engines driving a missile with a flock of pigeons in the nose cone pecking away. Walden Two is Skinner's utopian novel / sc...

True enough, cognitive neuroscience has much more explanatory power than psychoanalysis does. However, Freud (born in 1856, died in 1939) predates cog...

I could elaborate, but if I did, I would spoil the good impression I made on you. Besides, it's highly unoriginal. It's just pieces I picked up elsewh...

Interesting point about Tolkien: Roughly 80% of the words in the Lord of the Rings trilogy are Anglo-Saxon words that make up the 'core' of English. A...

Over the last century, the use frequency of "men", "women", "human", and "people" in print has changed quite a bit. In 1922 the most common collective...

I'm a pacifist and I agree that wars are unethical. Pacifism is an individual position. Nations can not take that view. Nations don't worry about ethi...

And what's 'dignity' got to do with it? I'm not talking here about the persuasiveness of argument or logic. The "persuasiveness" of which I speak is t...

Have we forgotten Clausewitz? War is a mere continuation of policy by other means. (longer quote at end of post) Russia's invasion of the Ukraine was ...

I was merrily reading The Power Broker until Moses started getting really nasty. Caro is a great biographer. You could start on his bio of Lyndon B. J...

On the plus side, you're not still in the corridor at an overworked A&E. On the negative side, a day in the hallway... No room in the inn? More on the...

Lovely tale.

I am not familiar with every large gay community in the US, but I am more familiar with Boystown in Chicago than any other outside of my hometown. At ...

Gays have been subjected to instances of bullying, beatings, and murder, true enough. In my experience, gays managed to get along in a frequently unfr...

For us old guys, it is surprising to find that we are almost one quarter into the new century. So to all, Happy New Year; to some Merry Christmas (It'...