Where would the world be without the USA?

[bertsmobile1]

When I lived closer to the city I used to go to a lot of public lectures on all sorts of things.
Nothing expands the mind more than listening to presentations that you know nothing about or even better ones that you disagree with.
Really cheap entertainment .
One such lecture was by a forensic accountant who looked at the rise & fall of empires based on the ratio of their military spending.
HE came up with a fairly tight range and prospered that when any empire exceeds this range they go into decline
The USA had been over the decline rate since mid Vietnam war days.
Don't know how accurate any of the numbers actually were but it was roughly the same ratio for England, Spain, Portugal , Turkey , France , Persia, Mongolia & of course both the USSR & the USA.
Well not long after the USSR went into rapid decline , the cold war armaments having sent them broke .
An interesting theory & from memory he was a Princeton Don .
The basic premise being that an empire ( or sphere of influence ) is only worth maintaining if the financial benefits outweigh the costs by around 4:1

 

[Ranamow]

Wow! Who thought that lawnmowers could stir up such controversy.?

 

[slomo]

Since you're not here for me to cave in your face, I'll have to limit my aggression to a simple double f#ck yourself.

Can I get my face caved on too? Don't want to miss out on all the fun.

 

[slomo]

My fav was the porn industry. No mention about this prestigious monumental wonderful world class business.

 

[bertsmobile1]

Wow! Who thought that lawnmowers could stir up such controversy.?

Always worth while to communicate with people and get their opinions & ideas particularly if it contravines the ones you have
People who feel the need to vent are just people with emotions that they are allowing to over ride their interlect so you stand back and allow them to cool off and have a think.
Those of us with a properly gained education in the sciences & engineering are always taught to question what we believe unless it can be proven & proven repeatidly .
I would expect arbee is either a veteran, current serving defence person or a close friend / relation of a service person who very well could have been injured or killed which is a tragic event And I honestly feel for him.

Foreign interventions are always politically motivated and the politics are generally based on economics . Humanities come way down the list .
If a Western power was interested in protecting the people in a foreign country then they would be supplying help to people who are rising against a tyrant, and Syria is the perfect example.
The people got pushed to the point that they can not take it any more & revolted .
Initally some of the Western powers provided backed the people then other countries backed the tyrant because it was in their financial interest so the West backed off and those seeking a better government got slaughtered .
In Iraq the US stood by till the Iraq government started to move the oil futures from the NY stock exchange to the Frankfurt stock exchange.
If oil futures shifted to Europe the value of the US dollar would drop like a stone because the Euro would suddenly become the default world currency .
Now by chance, an error in Western intellegence could not account for all of the weapons the West had sold / given to Iraq when they were at war with Iran, nor could they account for all of the weapons given the Iran when the Shar was the tyrant leader .
So the "weapons of mass destruction" myth was invented in the knowledge that the stuff the West had sold to both sides would be uncovered so the intervention would be justified on a humanitarian objective .
Unfortuneatly the intel was not good so no weapons were found because what had not been used had been sold .
The testiment to this is the US ( and Australia , cause we were there too ) had no plans about how to manage Iraq after Sadam was deposed other than to set up the oil ministry to protect US oil interests and shift all futures back to NY .

And I am not taking any moral high ground , we were there , lock step with the US and in our case the Prime Minister made the decision to go to war by himself, he did not even consult the defence minister or any military chief before he announced we were going to Iraq . Then there was our treatment of the Timorese & NG .

Free & fearless communication between people is the basic building block of a democracy and should never be sensored

 

[Scrubcadet10]

the person who doesn't listen to other points of view is i don't know what.... I listened to all sides, considered and made my mind up on what I think was the best track for our country to go on and voted for people who have the same line of thought.

 

[RolandW]

Politics is the worst way ever invented to make decisions. America became a great place because people were once free to do whatever they wanted so long as they didn't hurt anybody else.
Now, any time there's a decision to be made, we have to vote on it and then force the result on everybody. Or worse yet, vote for a gang of lying, thieving sociopaths who then in turn vote on it and force the result on everybody. This guarantees never-ending conflict, which is exactly what the political class wants. No amount of happy talk about tolerance and listening to opposing views will fix it. In the end, somebody will be forced to do something they didn't want to do, or not do something that they did want to do, and they will be mad as hell.
The only way to restore peace and prosperity is to tell politicians to shut up and mind their own business. Ignore them except to laugh at them. Then return to a paradigm where you pick what you want, I pick what I want, and we pay for it ourselves. When was the last time you saw an argument in the dairy aisle over whole vs. skim vs. two percent?

 

[Scrubcadet10]

Politics is the worst way ever invented to make decisions. America became a great place because people were once free to do whatever they wanted so long as they didn't hurt anybody else.
Now, any time there's a decision to be made, we have to vote on it and then force the result on everybody. Or worse yet, vote for a gang of lying, thieving sociopaths who then in turn vote on it and force the result on everybody. This guarantees never-ending conflict, which is exactly what the political class wants. No amount of happy talk about tolerance and listening to opposing views will fix it. In the end, somebody will be forced to do something they didn't want to do, or not do something that they did want to do, and they will be mad as hell.
The only way to restore peace and prosperity is to tell politicians to shut up and mind their own business. Ignore them except to laugh at them. Then return to a paradigm where you pick what you want, I pick what I want, and we pay for it ourselves. When was the last time you saw an argument in the dairy aisle over whole vs. skim vs. two percent?

I'm telling you... More Personal Liberty...... You do what you want as long as you are not impacting/hurting the lives and or livelihoods of others.

 

[slomo]

How about the porn industry?

You guys know, in the USA, the porn industry made the VCR THE standard format for recording back in the day? Porn industry said VCR. That killed off the Beta machines from Sony in the standardization race. THAT is how we all had VCR's in our houses.

 

[bertsmobile1]

Vote for some one else and convince enough of your friends to do the same.
Minor parties can never form a government but if they can get 1% or 2% of the vote then that can & dose cause the major parties to change policy.
Switzerland is the only Western government that has true democracy and from memory they have not been involved in a war for near 200 years.
What we tend to forget is democracy was invented to subjucate the poor & protect the property of the rich