“You Fascist!!!!”

life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the
politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruptions fears life. SAUL ALINSKY (1909-1972), Rules
for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Radicals, 1971.

Seductiveness may be characterized as the polar opposite of nurturance, which indicates
hopefulness, the belief that if you are open, trusting, and giving, there is a real chance that instead of
being exploited, your actions will be reciprocated. …It is understandable, therefore, that the seductive
personality will search for and tend to gauge potential partners in terms of their weakness, inferiority,
and vulnerability to being exploited. GERALD ALPER, The Puppeteers: Studies of Obsessive Control,
1994.

The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the
political field. He argues and analyzes in a way he would readily recognize as infantile within the
sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again. JOSEPH A. SCHUMPETER (1883-1950),
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1950.

Mass behavior is associated with activist interpretations of democracy and with increasing reliance on force to resolve social conflict. … The breakdown of normal restraints, including internalized
standards of right conduct, and established channels of action … frees the mass to engage in direct,
unmediated efforts to achieve its goals and to lay hands upon the most readily accessible
instruments of action. PHILIP SELZNICK, The Organizational Weapon, 1952.

The result of a narcissistic version of reality is that the expressive powers of adults are reduced.
They cannot play with reality, because reality matters to them only when it in some way promises to mirror intimate needs. RICHARD SENNETT, The Fall of Public Man, 1976.

“Boredom: the desire for desires” Tolstoy

“Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom” Schopenhauer

“I’ve got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.” Carlyle…

“Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” Aldous Huxley

“The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.” Sontag

“Is boredom anything less than the sense of one’s faculties slowly dying?”

Thank you sir.

I will not see my assets and savings and hard work be flushed down the drain by somebody promoting so-called opportunity and positive ideas of a ‘cliff’.

Let’s solve the problem.

Judo isn’t practical in real life, just in demonstrations. The UFC is proof of that by being dominated by guys who basically just know how to pound the hell out of some judo master’s head.

“The only people who benefit from the cliff are a few – not families who have had “PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY” over the years.”

Exactly! The world foxmarks is advocating is not a world I want my kids or their kids to have to grow up dealing with.

A balanced budget requirement doesn’t mean squat when your budget doesn’t have to be anything but bogus made up numbers and associations.

Example:

“The federal government does not adhere to GAAP — generally accepted accounting principles. Nor does it use independent accountants. In other words, politicians, not accountants, decide how to keep track of the federal government’s financial affairs.
But politicians, like the rest of us, tend to follow the path of least resistance in pursuing their self-interests. It is a lot easier to cook the books a little than it is to make hard political choices on taxes and spending.
That’s why a balanced budget amendment would not reduce the deficit; it would result in a lot of cooked books, instead.
Just consider New York State, whose government in more ways than one is the federal government writ small. Like many states, New York has a constitutional requirement that its expense budget be balanced. But in 1992 Albany found itself $200 million short of that mandate. Did the legislature and the governor raise taxes or cut spending? Certainly not. The state of New York simply sold Attica Prison to itself.
I am not making this up. The Urban Development Corporation, a state agency established to help redevelop troubled urban areas, borrowed in the bond market, turned the money over to the state, and took title to the prison. The state, in turn, recorded the $200 million its own agency had borrowed as income, proclaimed the budget balanced, and now rents Attica from the UDC.”
– John Steele Gordon –

Clearly, without GAAP, a balanced budget is effectively worthless when it comes to controlling the chicanery the government can get up to.

Almost all the current fiscal issues come from that.

If you want a major way to fix this flaw in the original system, it would be to constitutionally require all government, state, local, and federal — to be done using GAAP rules for all accounting practices.

The amount of sheer, inarguable chicanery that would be tossed right out would be a huge benefit.