Both...A half hour up the coast from Hilo, and a West County resident in Gateway...i get down to Branson, we do a fair amount of fishing on the White River lakes of Table Rock, Bull Shoals and Taneycomo. Recently a 40 lb 5 oz trout came out of Taneycomo...f'ing pig. Look it up, she was huge...they weighed her at Phil Lilley's place. An 8 or 9 yr old hatchery fish. I highly recommend Lilley's for a getaway. Reasonable rates, you are just a few miles from the dam by water, and 10 minutes from town. Little Nashville...

Well said Bronxcheer. Aside from which, in the US, over 40% of the hospitalized patients are 45 and under, so it is NOT only fatal or dangerous to old people. But even if it were, look your elders in the eye and tell them how important it is to get Wall Street back up and running (The Federal Reserve has been putting $1 trillion A DAY into the banks for almost a week now, but can't do the same for say, the Medicare or Social Security Funds to provide income transfers and health care access to everyone).

Unbelievable.

Anyone remember the anthropology/archeology bestseller from the 1980s "Origins" by Richard Leakey, one of the most respected archeologists in the world?

He showed that in all probability, the evolutionary advantage to human beings came from the moment when human communities decided to feed and care for everyone in the band, village, community or tribe. This included the elderly who had life experience and knew things. This meant that knowledge could be passed on, allowing us, unlike other species, to accumulate collectively knowledge, techiques, abilities, experience, beyond a single lifetime, passing them on to future generations. This practice was despite the old no longer being able to hunt or work or farm or produce very effectively anymore. But their important was recognized. It was the real start to civilization or at least its precondition. Saving the elderly saved us all.

Further, remember the movie "2012"? When everyone was thinking about the end of the world cause of the Mayan calendar?

So in that movie the very rich and powerful have secretly set up these big ships to enable them to live through the flood and the end times.

But in the end a decision is made to let many others aboard because "if this is what we become, what is it we are saving anyway? We would already have lost everything if we let everyone else die."

So it is. What say thee?

Glad you are well Steven. Keep thee head down!

I say I'm sick and tired of the irresponsible ignorance within our species ruining things for the responsible.
I'm sick and tired of defenders of the indefensible trying to pretend that their mistaken notion about Trump was anything but a pipe dream.
The notion that HE was fit to lead anything was completely dispelled by the truth available in the public domain AT THE TIME, but they didn't want to KNOW the truth............because they were so afraid of the alternative choice.............a choice that presented a future they feared BIGLY!

I don't blame anyone for fear of the unknown, or even fear of a different governing philosophy taking hold......... I get that, BUT I DO blame folks for not awaking to the error of their choices when it is so easily seen and known.

In Trump world, EVERYTHING is about Trump. His ego is all consuming. Thus, even a Pandemic that threatens to KILL thousands of our Country's citizens isn't about an illness and defeating the "unseen enemy" (as He likes to call it when He isn't calling it the Chinese Virus) it's about HIM!
The numbers, HOW do they look in assessing HIM? HIS economy. Not ours mind you, but HIS! He doesn't give a damn about YOUR economy, it's just HOW it looks. All that matters is HIM! HIS re-election chances.

Yesterday I quoted Einstein. Here (this thread) I believe.
I asked If anyone knew what HE was referring to when he made that statement.
Anyone know? Steven? anyone?

We got the Tea Party and Fox rallies after the black President's stimulus and bailouts

Will we see Tea Party II after Donny's $2.3 trillion bailouts and stimulus?

I'm guessing not

remember that commercial where the homeowner's company protected you from nothing but the zombie apocalypse ?

continued best wishes to all of my fellow pompous idiots.
for those between 20 - 45 think 1 % or even 0.5 % and do the math for going about regular business as usual.
for those who smoke a lot or vape a lot you could be like someone 65 even if you are 30.
we are only a few weeks in.
remember the alamo.

Posted by laramiebob on 3/23/2020 5:41:00 PM (view original):
Physicist (and all around pretty smart guy) Albert Einstein said: "We shall require a substantial new manner of thinking if Mankind is to survive."

I wish I knew just what, specifically, He was warning us about when he said that.
I'm no wizard but I suspect it may have been (or still is) important.

Someday we'll all know just HOW it is we got here as this very divided Country.
Someday we'll all know just How badly we got shucked in 2016.
Someday (I hope) we'll all find out how close we came to ruin in 4 short years.
Someday the ability of a POTUS to strike out truth with a sharpie and a false edit and fool Americans will be over.
Someday soon, I hope.

But then, I've been advised.
Some people never know.

Hi LaramieBob, i hope you (and everyone here) are well and safe.

My memory, but I am far from certain, is that Einstein was refering to the fact that our scientific prowess had reached the point where is was leaving in the dust our ability to develop ethical standards (or something like that) and ways of understanding the world that could enable us to make the right decisions in such new situations. I think the quote specifically cited nuclear weapons as an example, but not as the core of the problem, just a case of it. I may be wrong. Can't remember when or where I would have seen it but it is very familiar.

Einstein incidentally wrote this article: https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/

I agree with you that Biden probably cannot win.

I think that there was a window, between Super Tuesday and the following round of primaries he won, and the initial outbreak period of this coronavirus crisis, when he seemed like Chance the Gardener from "Being There" - luckiest boy in the world. Obama apparently worked behind the scenes to get all the other candidates to drop out except Warren whom he convinced to stay in and divide the progressive vote with Bernie, to win Super Tuesday for Biden, and then with a lead the coronavirus thing made Trump look lost and also sunk the economy which was his best pitch.

But then....Biden went missing for a full week. Then he emerged, AFTER Trump had held press conferences every day, even speaking of taking equity in companies that were bailed out and against them using bailout money to buy back shares of their own stock, stuff that only Warren, AOC and Bernie (okay and to some extent on the days he is not off his meds Tucker Carlson too) have raised, AFTER Cuomo held press conferences daily, AFTER Bernie put forward a comprehensive plan to deal with the crisis, posted podcasts every day, including roundtables with union leaders, and with progressive Congresswomen on what to do, only AFTER all that, and AFTER Pelosi and Schumer had put forward their ideas, he gave a shaky, disorganized podcast talk in which he read from a teleprompter like a piece of wood, then forgot what he was talking about and clearly did not even know when he was live and on camera. Then he went on three TV shows, and coughed continuously into his hands, touched his face and had to be told not to by the CNN anchor, then repeated the Trump line about the cure not being worse than the coronavirus disease and said "we must take care of the cure because the cure will make things worse" whatever that meant, then he did a long interview in which he kept apologizing for characterizing Trump in a mean way or something, and he and the interviewer kept talking over one another, then stopping for radio silence. Then he said he doesn't want a political battle over coronavirus with Trump.

Trump went up to 50% approval for the first time, and in my view that was partly because no one sees any alternative to him, since they have been told that Bernie is finished, true or not (not quite, not yet), and that Biden is the candidate against him, so it was Trump or someone whose idea of leadership was to disappear for a whole week during a civilizational threat and crisis and a new Great Depression, then show up , say the same stuff either Trump is already saying or that all the Democrats already said, and make a zillion mistakes doing it.

This could be ugly, like Mondale ugly.

I hope you are right dino27. Certainly things are about to get much worse in the US in terms of the health crisis and the economy.

At some point people expect their President to look after their needs and interests, or at least to concern himself with their security and safety.

If that doesn't happen, if Hoovervilles form as in the 1930s, if New Orleans goes under water and people see their fellow Americans drowning and no one helping or even seeming concerned, they get restless to say the least. That is why FDR won and the New Deal was acceptable despite being a pretty radical departure from how things had been done before, and why Obama won.

But let's not forget that for many, losing their homes and then having Obama bail out the banks (Bush did too but it seemed to take place under Obama's watch, and then he did it himself as well), and then have them have to pay taxes to bailout the bank that had foreclosed on their home was too much for many.

And free trade has wrecked the industrial base and the lives of working class people, just as Ross Perot, the unions, the protesters in Seattle in 1999 and me all said it would. That the Clinton, Obama, Biden wing of the Democratic Party seems ready to get back to business as usual - Silicon Valley is okay, Wall Street is a model citizen, globalization is a wonderful adventure, and will seemingly represent the party again in the next election, does not bode well.

No one wants them. Those that cling to them just don't want Republicans understandably. But by accepting the Wall Street Democrats, they condemn their own party and cause to being unpopular and giving Trump an undeserved moral high ground on trade and working class jobs and incomes.

The reality is this: the tariffs were and are a good idea. They were a good idea when Alexander Hamilton called for them in his "Report on Manufacturers" , they were a good idea when Lincoln put down the Free Trade Democrats who sold cotton to Britain using slave labor, and they were a good idea when our country industrialized - the US had the highest tariffs in the world almost all the time up to the Reagan Administration, when instead we decided "markets good, democratic government bad" and things went straight down hill. Clinton accelerated the destruction of the working class that Reagan had started.

No one believes in globalization anymore, nor should they. The Democratic position should be: Trump was right to put tariffs up, but we want better tariffs that protect working conditions, we want strong unions, we want health care and more opportunity for working people, and we need to restore manufacturing through a guiding hand of government to devleop the industries of the future, whereas Trump's tariffs won't actually bring that about, but let's give him credit, the tariffs did stop the hemorraging of jobs and industry to China. But we can do even better. But no one wants to go back to globalization and free trade and see how it also made us vulnerable to a major health crisis first by spreading it around the world, and then because all the medical equipment we need and even the medicine we need, are produced overseas.

But the tariffs did have something to do with the low unemployment before the virus. He does deserve credit for that. And free trade was why we had "jobless recoveries" and no wage growth even during low unemployment like in the 1990s.

But as to the government role in the health crisis: during World War II the War Production Board took over production of penicillin directly not trusting the private sector to do the job. In 1943 when they took over production directly, we produced 21 billion units, in 1944 1.7 trillion, and in 1944 in time for the D-Day Normandy invasion 6.8 trillion. That is what government can accomplish when you don't believe in the stupidity of the market.

Source: Phillips and Rozworski, "People's Republic of Walmart" pp.121-122.