The Goat Pen

I grew up in the UMWA world. My grandfather was a miner, my dad started out as a UMWA member, then later in life actually started a nonunion strip mining operation. Deaths during a strike was common and expected.

sardis wrote:I grew up in the UMWA world. My grandfather was a miner, my dad started out as a UMWA member, then later in life actually started a nonunion strip mining operation. Deaths during a strike was common and expected.

my family left all that at the turn of the century (1900, not 2000)

It was 1980 so stfu...

hillbilly fight!

sardis wrote:It was 1980 so stfu...

not sure why you're offended at that statement but whatever

It was self-effacing humor. I will not dispute the fact of the backwardness of my homeland. Wish some others would realize their same reality...

LOL @ the Race section...

http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/prima ... exit-polls

man, fuck that...guilt is stepping up after 3 or 4 days, or a month. A decade? That's shit that would make me want to take a pinky off the girl...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/0 ... 02468.html

Oh man. Damn. 9 years. 9 effin years. That ain't right.

Really, DEMs? Grow some nuts...

http://shorewood.patch.com/articles/sta ... sandwiches

Maybe it was $.99 day.

hevy Volt named European Car of the Year

http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2 ... f-the-year

They've secured European journalist market...

For $40K you can have this http://www.cars.com/go/search/detail.js ... listType=1

or pay $34K for this and pay an additional $6k in gas http://www.cars.com/go/search/detail.js ... listType=1

Well, things like this make me not-so-sympathetic about our actions on Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

The Chinese prisoner had been deliberately infected with the plague as part of a research project -- the full horror of which is only now emerging -- to develop plague bombs for use in World War II. After infecting him, the researchers decided to cut him open to see what the disease does to a man's inside. No anesthetic was used, he said, out of concern that it might have an effect on the results.

That research program was one of the great secrets of Japan during and after World War II: a vast project to develop weapons of biological warfare, including plague, anthrax, cholera and a dozen other pathogens. Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army conducted research by experimenting on humans and by "field testing" plague bombs by dropping them on Chinese cities to see whether they could start plague outbreaks. They could.

By conventional standards, few people were more cruel than the farmer who as a Unit 731 medic carved up a Chinese prisoner without anesthetic, and who also acknowledged that he had helped poison rivers and wells. Yet his main intention in agreeing to an interview seemed to be to explain that Unit 731 was not really so brutal after all.

Asked why he had not anesthetized the prisoner before dissecting him, the farmer explained: "Vivisection should be done under normal circumstances. If we'd used anesthesia, that might have affected the body organs and blood vessels that we were examining. So we couldn't have used anesthetic."

When the topic of children came up, the farmer offered another justification: "Of course there were experiments on children. But probably their fathers were spies."

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/17/world ... all&src=pm

Maybe a nuke or two could straighten out the arabs too. I doubt it.

I hope we at least try.

Where Pres Candidates stand...

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/03/pr ... ate-issues

Before they went off to fight in Afghanistan, the guys of 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines talked quietly about their deepest fear. Not dying. Not losing a leg or an arm.

It was having their genitals ripped off, burned away or crushed in the fiery blast of an improvised explosive device.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/2 ... 35356.html

"Official Congressional budget estimates understate the peril of rising debt, Fed chair Ben Bernanke told the Budget Committee on Capitol Hill today.

Warning that our nation's fiscal health has deteriorated appreciably since the onset of the financial crisis and the recession, Bernanke called upon lawmakers to confront the long term fiscal challenges sooner rather than later. If lawmakers don't confront them, they'll find themselves confronted by them.

From Bernanke's prepared remarks:

By definition, the unsustainable trajectories of deficits and debt that the CBO outlines cannot actually happen, because creditors would never be willing to lend to a government with debt, relative to national income, that is rising without limit. One way or the other, fiscal adjustments sufficient to stabilize the federal budget must occur at some point. The question is whether these adjustments will take place through a careful and deliberative process that weighs priorities and gives people adequate time to adjust to changes in government programs or tax policies, or whether the needed fiscal adjustments will come as a rapid and painful response to a looming or actual fiscal crisis.

Bernanke explained that the Congressional Budget Office's calculations miss an important reality. As the government's debt and deficits rise, the economy will slow down—an effect not taken into account by the CBO. So, for instance, when the CBO says that federal spending for health-care programs will roughly double as a percentage of GDP in the next 25 years, it is probably being too optimistic. If debt keeps, rising, GDP will be much lower than the CBO estimates—which will mean that health care spending will be a much larger percentage of the overall economy.

Here's Bernanke on the effect of rising debt:

Sustained high rates of government borrowing would both drain funds away from private investment and increase our debt to foreigners, with adverse long-run effects on U.S. output, incomes, and standards of living. Moreover, diminishing investor confidence that deficits will be brought under control would ultimately lead to sharply rising interest rates on government debt and, potentially, to broader financial turmoil. In a vicious circle, high and rising interest rates would cause debt-service payments on the federal debt to grow even faster, resulting in further increases in the debt-to-GDP ratio and making fiscal adjustment all the more difficult.

In short, the official estimates members of Congress hear from their budget office are under-estimating our dire economic predicament. If fiscal policy is not brought under control, things will be much, much worse. "

That's true...with a couple of items added:

1. Nothing meaningful can be done until we agree to cut defense spending. That never seems to happen
2. It's not totally true that interest rates on govt debt will sharply rise, in the near term (less than 10 years). However, I recognize Bernanke was making a point about the long-term. I can easily see pundits ignoring that point, though. There are no other safe havens at this juncture to flee to as an alternative for sovereign debt. I think the US Treasury yield is basically 0 now (or maybe negative) yet we can't issue it quickly enough for investors and gold is not a viable option
3. We will wind up going solely after entitlements for cuts, I expect, but I keep arguing that wacking away at Social Security and Medicare, by itself, only takes away the name, not the liability