I don't mean to make light of a terrible industrial accident. Still, it bears consideration that this story has received a very tiny fraction of the news coverage Three Mile Island received. In fact, whenever there is a coal-related disaster of any magnitude it's reported the same way industrial accidents are. "Such-and-such explosion, X many casualties, blah blah blah, and on to tomorrow's weather!..."
Remember this the next time you see one reported: if only one person is injured--not even killed, just injured--that is more bodily harm than was caused by Three Mile Island.
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So, the federal deficit is going to be over $1,000 billion per year for the foreseeable future. Are we agreed on this?
US is heading for a debt crisis. I have to ask: where are all the people who were screaming bloody murder over the "Bush war deficit" of $1,000 billion? (And whose numbers were farcical?) These people were rending their garments and tearing their hair over what the "Bush war deficit" was going to do to the United States.
...by the way, for a professional journalist, the writing in that article smells a bit.
The Boortz post from whence that link came.
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Along with huge tax increases, we can expect huge new taxes to be levied. The Democrats know they can't spend money like this ad infinitum without doing something to balance the books--to approximate balancing the books, as Democrats never saw a deficit they didn't like. But massive deficits like the ones they've given us 2008-2010 won't do, and they know it.
Unfortunately for us, Democrats have never seen a tax they didn't like, either. Left to their own devices, the Democrats will not only give us a value-added tax, but also a carbon tax; and probably a tax tax if they can find a way to give it a veneer of legitimacy.
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Big Dick gives us a foretaste of ObamaCare.
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GM is partially owned by the US government. The government has decided to fine Toyota.
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Here is a great piece on why one shouldn't buy an iPad.
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Though this gets a few points wrong it is still an excellent critique of how the Baby Boomers comport themselves.
To people like me, the 1950s (and early 1960s) look pretty good. Energy was cheap. Wages were good. A guy with only a high school diploma could make enough money to buy a nice house and support a family; his wife didn't need to work and could stay home with the kids.
Yeah, if you were middle class you couldn't just go out to a bar and "hook up" with a girl; you had to court her and be respectable. If you weren't, her father could (and would, in many cases) run your ass off and make it stick (even with credible threats of violence. About which the police would do nothing). You had to be polite to people, too, which included having the courtesy to respect the norms of society even if you didn't agree with them. (You could be as sick a fuck as you wanted to be--in private.)
But you can't lay all the blame on the Boomers. They had help: FDR and Truman and Johnson backed schemes which contributed mightily to the situation we find ourselves in now. Without the political opportunism of prominent Democrats, without the desire for socialism and redistributionism and government control, society might have weathered the storm of selfishness and idiocy.
Or might not.
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This is genius. The next time I'm out running errands, I'm going to pick up some binder clips specifically for this purpose.
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I just heard on the radio that the FCC can't regulate the Internet. That means ComCast can throttle the shit out of your service if it thinks you're using too much bandwidth.
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Total activity for Monday: wrote post #2012, and watched Lovely Complex eps 6-10.
Oh. I went to the local pizza parlor to pick up an order of fettucini alfredo. Dinner was fettucini alfredo with ham.
So was Tuesday's breakfast.
...but my self-prescribed bed rest is helping enormously. I still don't feel well but I feel better. The cough is better. I'm still feeling tired and weak but that, too, is slowly improving.
I haven't played WoW for a week.