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"Economists warn that a jump in rates will clobber stocks and cripple the already stalled housing market."

Yes, because people just HATE lending money at a higher interest rate...

They could always, you know, compensate for this by helping companies with that other fundraising method they tend to use. What was that, again? Oh, right! Equity! Let's reduce or eliminate the capital gains tax and reduce other potential barriers to stock market investment! After all, companies don't seem to be too keen on accumulating more debt at this time. Companies could have an easier time expanding, pay down their debt, and Bernanke could start raising interest rates without fearing such a significant backlash in the economy.

Then again, that would be the sensible solution. =P

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Why Virgil0211 and Lord T Hawkeye are subbed to this guy is beyond me...

He occasionally puts out a video that amuses me, but I haven't checked my subs in a long time.

Am I the only one who gets the feeling that this case's media attention is just another sign of the depravity of the mainstream media?

[up his alley.]

you got me curious: what do you think was intended?

it sounds like it's up his alley.

Though it would've worked better with a slight pause before you say the last bit. :-P

I have a friend of mine, J. Lowe, who would just love to read this....it sounds like it's up his alley.

Dear god, I heard a rimshot in my head after I read that last bit. >_<

I'd prefer leaving it up to the market. I'd expect gold to be important, but I doubt it'd be used in all cases. I'd expect other base metals (and some wacky alternative-base currencies, though in smaller amounts) to be tried. I think it'd be funny if gold, silver, & bronze came into use like they were in some fantasy games where a certain number of bronze coins equaled a silver coin, and a certain number equaled a gold coin, and you could get change in different currencies and such. Though that would require that people be allowed to establish currencies on their own first. I doubt the government would be too keen on giving up the power that a fiat money gives them over the economy, in spite of the consequences.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/08/keith-judd-texas-inmate-g_n_1501761.html?ref=elections-2012&icid=maing-grid7|aim|dl1|sec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D159060

Voting is not a joke!

What can I say? We Texans are just that damned charming. Look at Kinky Friedman, Will Wrights, Tommy Lee Jones, or myself even? Can you honestly say you'd be able to resist voting for us in a political primary?

*One MEEEEEEEEEELLION dollar smile!* :-)   |   )

Of course if the weight hits your foot in a bad way and the foot gets the wrong treatment afterwards it might as well mean amputation anyway.

Even so, you're talking about guaranteed amputation versus potential amputation. Which one would you pick? :-P

I'm sure that's the case, and not used to third-party politics as well. When he runs as a Republican, it might be wise to soften the message up again to appeal to the base. But when you're running third-party, the more you're like the Democrats or Republicans the LESS reason people have to vote for you!

True. Maybe you could get an interview with him for a Bogosity podcast or something where you guys discuss campaign strategy?

Not really, it just showed me how much lower we can sink...

Lol. I guess it's just me. I mean, unless I see property damage & ambulances, that = a good convention in my book. That's what I get for involving myself in thousand-person venues run by glorified high school clubs. :-P

That's the impression I got. It seems that Johnson was unaware of what a lot of his supporters were up to. I tried several times just to get a 2-minute interview with him, and he was friendly and willing to do so, but one of his campaign people (ALWAYS with him) would step up and say, "No, we need to go now." Bastages.

We really wanted an opportunity to talk to him absent his campaign staff. We got the impression from talking with him that he supported the Fair Tax kind of reluctantly, like he thought he had to in order to have an effective campaign. We think he's getting bad advice.

Honestly, that wouldn't surprise me. It might be a case of conversion difficulties. He's got experience with campaigning at the local & state levels. He might be keeping the same people around him, who may not be used to campaigning on a national level, and a few new people who aren't quite all they're cracked up to be. That was part of the problem with the convention I described as the "toughest one I volunteered for". It was that group's first attempt at a larger venue/convention that would cater to an audience greater than 100 people (and ended up attracting thousands in the process).

By the way, did my horror stories improve your feelings about the LNC? :-P

Isn't that more or less what the US did in Libya?  Didn't that end up working out about as well as I predicted it would?

I meant an improvement over trying the whole nation-building thing, like with Iraq and Afghanistan. Not that this would actually be desirable. One might compare it to choosing between having a 20 lbs weight dropped on your foot and having your foot amputated. They both suck, but one might not be as bad as the other.

Also, in my defense, I was rambling/hypothesizing. Keep in mind that it IS finals week and I have a tendency to just freetype during this period. :-P

I know, right?

Seems like one of those very, very odd little things that just doesn't seem to make any sense however you try to view it. I mean, really, I can't understand it. Maybe WAR put on a good act for GJ or something and GJ wasn't quite aware of just how crazy he was? (I mean, it's possible. Aside from this forum, the only other place I know WAR from was the video interview Reason.com did with him a while back.)

Gary Johnson actually endorsed him! I'm behind him as a candidate, but he's not making it easy for me to like him. Of course, I don't really like the idea of ANY Presidential candidate endorsing ANY candidate for party office, just on principle.

I'm good with it. We cleaned house. We got good people in to the 4 offices, and there's at least 2 at-large members who are good, principled Libertarians, too.

The mind boggles...

The hotel wasn't the greatest venue, either. I thought the Flamingo (where TAM6 was held) was a bad venue for a convention, but the Red Rock proved to be MUCH worse. It was hard to find your way around, wasn't really convenient, and the hotel staff didn't help, either. One of their security flunkies told me I couldn't hold up my Lee Wrights sign when I was manning the Lee Wrights table!

1. Same here. I actually reread that line 3 times when I saw it in a story on Reason. I mean, from what I understand about Gary Johnson, he and WAR are about as compatible as oil & water. I mean, that's a bit like nominating Bill Maher for a post at the CDC.

2. Well, at least that's good news. Here's to hoping it yields future returns.

3. You have no idea. Here's the stuff that I can think of off of the top of my head:

1:[spoiler] At the largest convention I've volunteered for, the venue regularly overcrowds. Now, the overcrowding itself isn't so much the problem as the little side-effects that come with the overcrowding. The "safety" staff (because we're all unpaid volunteers & Texas law prevents us from identifying ourselves as 'security' unless we have a license from the TDC) keeps abreast of Amber Alert and possible sex offenders in the area. Now, consider that up to 50% of the attendees will be heavily costumed and you have about 15-25 active duty safety staff (on the good days) for a venue that attracts several thousand people in a large crowd. It's the Where's Waldo book from hell. [/spoiler]

2: [spoiler]This has also led to a strange phenomenon of homeless people walking onto the grounds in order to panhandle (which has jokingly been referred to as the "hobo hunt", as there's always one and he never seems to stay still long enough for the one who first sighted him to get word to the on-site officers on time. Yeah, that's another thing- we're technically no different than private citizens, so we can't physically restrain or bar someone's movements if they try to get into a restricted area or onto the premises without paying for a badge. We have to call the officers, who will then (hopefully) investigate and take action. Most active-duty officers I've ever seen on site? 3-4.)[/spoiler]

3: [spoiler]But that's not even the worst part of the overcrowding. Imagine that you have a diverse group of teenagers to young adults who, in their excitement to see as much as they can, may neglect certain hygiene practices. This is what is commonly referred to as "con funk". It's usually strongest in the areas where people linger in one area for an extended period, especially if they sweat (Arcade room, the room used for the "dance", & the "battlegrounds" area are usually the worst, and it's not unheard of for the smell to linger for more than 3 days after the end of the convention). [/spoiler]

4: [spoiler]Now those hygiene practices I mentioned? At the extreme end, they start to include the basic "eating & drinking" thing that's so popular among live humans. At smaller cons, this usually stays limited to the point that no significant action is needed by the staff (oftentimes they'll just head back up to their room and rest). However, for some reason, the larger cons also attract a few of the more... Okay, I'll just say it. They attract the nutcases. At this "largest convention" I've volunteered at (name redacted to protect the innocent :-P), there is ALWAYS someone leaving in an ambulance on each day at least once. Usually, it'll seem like one is lingering in the road outside on Saturday when it's actually multiple ambulances. Saturday's usually the day that the "big musical guest" plays their concert, and they often attract some psychotically devoted fans. These are usually the ones who forget to eat and drink water by the time of the concert and actually need to be wheeled out on a gurney. In one extreme event, a girl passed out during the concert from dehydration to be wheeled out to the ambulance and, once she stabilized (apparently she was well enough that she didn't need to go to the hospital immediately, though I'm mainly going on observation here), she asked them to wheel her back in. For some reason, they allowed this, and I can't imagine why to this day (although, like I said, I'm going by observation & what the guys upstairs said. What I definitely saw was a girl being wheeled out from the concert on a gurney, then wheeled back in about 20 minutes later.). [/spoiler]

5: [spoiler]Also, the dance I mentioned? It's technically a "rave", but they avoid using the term because of the association with drug use. You still have the techno music, the DJ, the smoke machines, glo-sticks, etc. Now, considering that I've already discussed the problem of finding people on the amber alert or sex offenders list is difficult, finding a hobo is difficult, and we have a dance done in a style that has historically been associated with drug use, and you can probably guess where I'm going with this. There is almost always one person apparently dealing ecstasy in the "rave". Because of how "safety" works (i.e., we call the on-site police and they handle it), I don't usually find out whether or not they were actually dealing. Oftentimes the police will escort him out of the dance and handle things. On the plus side, however, we usually have the same cops, each year and their hasn't been an incident involving violence (either to my knowledge or observation, but I could be wrong. There was one incident I heard of which actually happened off-premises between a street patrol officer & several intoxicated guys a bar down the street. I wasn't volunteering at this one, but one of my friends who volunteers more regularly than I do is a former MP (apparently also certified as a Krav Maga instructor) and current HCPD officer. Apparently, the officer stopped the guys for public intoxication and disorderly conduct, and one of the lieutenants who had a walkie-talkie noticed this and radioed my friend to see if he knew anything about it. That was when said drunk people attacked the officer. From what I heard, the guy in the lobby radioed "officer down", and he bolted out of Ops. Supposedly, he put the attackers in the hospital and performed first aid on the officer while the help arrived (Disclaimer: This is second-hand, so I'm not sure exactly how reliable this is, but I did get it from multiple sources at that event so I'm inclined to believe at least something happened.). [/spoiler]

6: [spoiler]Now, we get to the problem of management. Just about every one of these conventions is, in some way, the mutated outgrowth of some small anime club that grew beyond the "club" format. As such, there's a bit of nepotism and inexperience when it comes to the actual "management" functions. This can lead to such things as the owners of the convention pulling out a week before & leaving the on-site director with the responsibility of cleaning up their mess. They may also have difficulty with anything from negotiating with the venue (where the hotel apparently decides that the terms of the contract don't apply anymore and they can close the rooms whenever they wish) to just plain keeping the damn thing funded (toughest convention I volunteered for was one that literally renegotiated its contracts & changed owners twice in the weekend during the convention, and THEN needed to run a fundraiser on top of that). They also changed half the staff during that time as well. Of particular note (to me) was the "safety" (though at this time we were still calling them "security") head, who had no competencies whatsoever. I was just a volunteer and I ended up pulling him away from the arcade and tabletop gaming rooms 3 times. At this point, I was the only 'volunteer' left in security. There was one other person helping out who was a normal attendee who offered to lend a hand. It was the two of us trying to manage a little over 1,000 attendees. Luckily, the staff for each department managed to pick up some of the slack, but we still had to keep the main traffic areas running smoothly. At about the third time I had to pull the security head back to do his damned job, I was about ready to strangle the guy. Funnily enough, once we replaced him with someone who knew what they were doing, just about all the security volunteers who quit returned immediately.[/spoiler]

So, yeah. I think that covers most of the stuff I've run into. Hope that helps you feel better about the LNC. Keep in mind, though, I didn't even go into the broken chandelier that almost crushed a few attendees. There's more of this rabbit hole to traverse... :-P

Touché 

Guess I still got it. :-P

Funnily enough, I just read a story about how the F-22 in actuality was a rather substandard aircraft with a horrible service record (something like an average 1.7 hours of flight time before a catastrophic hardware failure that needs to be repaired, which impairs its range and potential use in long-term campaigns or extended flight/dogfights), excessive cost (something like close to $50k per flight hour of maintenance, a maintenance cost that's actually increasing as opposed to decreasing like other aircraft), minimal current use (it was more or less designed to combat advanced Russian fighter jets that they have yet to actually develop. Apart from that, it's not much more effective than other potential aircraft with lower maintenance requirements, which has resulted in it not seeing a single combat mission.), defective parts (the radar-absorbent coating, software, among other things, have been found defective and corrected once the aircraft was ordered), and a convoluted cost estimate that essentially led to the plane being only half-developed, with everything else being fixed or corrected later "in the field" (hence the defective parts).

And that's sad, because I kinda liked the F-22 from a conceptual/10-year-old-thinking-"Wow!-That-looks-cool!" standpoint. Yet one more military excess in a long, sad history of military excess. It's kinda funny, because they'll retire the SR-71 Blackbird* to cut costs while pulling crap like this. What sense does that make?

[spoiler]*In case you don't know, the SR-71 Blackbird was an old spy plane from the Cold War days, though it's unique for setting several world records in altitude and flight speed that remain unbroken to this day. Apparently, it was so fast that simply accelerating was enough to counter anti-air missile fire as it could simply outrun the missile. The ability to climb to such high altitudes already made it difficult to target anyway, and it utilized some of the first "anti-radar" construction methods & technologies. They retired the plane in 1989, though there was some push to bring it back in 1993. At least at the time (I don't know if this is still the case, though my smartphone's map/location tracking might lead me to believe it might be. :-P), spy satellites weren't capable of detailed observations over a period of time in the same way the pilot of an SR-71 would be able to. I could personally hypothesize that certain situations where satellite coverage is unfeasible, it may be easier to just send up a plane. Granted, we have drones and other unmanned vehicles which could perform these jobs (fun fact: the pressure against the reactivation of the SR-71 in '93 came in part from the manufacturers of UAVs), but I'm willing to bet that these weren't quite up to modern specifications in 1993. Even so, the US military doesn't seem to have had problems retaining other aircraft with apparently outdated construction (the AC-130 from the Vietnam War comes to mind, to name a popular example). Plus, I can imagine that there might be some advantages to a plane operated directly rather than remotely. There could also be some symbolic reasons for keeping around the plane that broke and maintained world records for several decades. Or maybe I'm just biased in favor of the SR-71. Because it's a cool plane. And that's why I'd never let myself run for a position in government. I'd make decisions on what military projects to fund based on 10-year-old logic, and we'd end up spending millions in the pursuit of developing the Metal Gear Gekko.

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Huh... Then again, it might not make much of a difference. :-P [/spoiler]

Sure, they can destroy Iran's army in short order, but what about blowback? I'm pretty sure that Russia and China (somewhat major trading partners with Iran, if I'm remembering correctly) would not be very tolerant of america attacking Iran?

What about the current rulers and their supporters? To them, history will be repeating itself, with a US installed government that they will have to overthrow again?

From what I'm hearing, your military leadership has not factored in all possible variables... just like with Afghanistan... just like with Iraq

We have military leadership? When did this happen? =P