I cannot add more but; huzzah, huzzah, huzzah!
8 hours ago
Thursday, November 17, 2011
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What is Sal drinking?
I'm going to be spending some quality time with the list of Southern cocktails from Garden & Gun through the new year.
I&W
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Blog Archive
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2011
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November
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- A Hendrix Christmas; in books
- The Navy Abandons its Dead
- When Warriors Slip in to Shadow
- The Power of the Gun
- NEX Fail
- Sunday Funnies
- Fullbore Friday
- A Thursday
- Why You Don't Make Fun of Beards & Turbans
- Retro Wednesday
- Keeping an Eye on the Long Game: Part XXXVII
- WINCHESTER 2-steps From Winchester
- Readiness, the last bastion of scoundrels
- Canada Rediscovers its Heritage
- Sunday Funnies
- Darkhorse Battalion with Tom Bowman; on Midrats
- Caption Contest!
- Fullbore Friday
- Nigel's Uncomfortable Truth
- Funny day #OWS picked, 17 NOV ...
- Diversity Thursday
- Plan Salamander Down Under
- Put up or Shut up
- From Palm to iPhone
- Walter Russell Mead goes Salamander on Boomers
- Russian Navy Staggers On
- USMC's UK Harrier Hedge
- OK, maybe he is trying to do more than sell books
- Yes, now get to work ....
- No excuse
- Sunday Funnies
- The Journalist at War; on Midrats
- Fullbore Friday
- 砂卵石
- Eating the Soul of a Child: Part III
- Diversity Thursday
- The Moral Rot of Sport Lust
- ... the rest of the story ....
- Cyberwar Warnings ...
- LCS ASUW: Farce Made Flesh
- The Fleets of Austerity; on Midrats
- Sunday Funnies
- That is the feeling, in a fashion
- Fullbore Friday
- NWC SITREP Wanted
- When you can't rule your coast ...
- Diversity Thursday
- Avoiding My Big Fat Greek Coup?
- That's the USNA Spirit I'm Look'n For!
- The Sound of Freedom
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November
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20 comments:
Keel to Zumwalt laid. http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/ac58063d67f5468fa81abf52c698e780/ME--Stealth-Destroyer/
Well now,
THAT was refreshing.
Yes,
We're building a great white elephant rather than a great white fleet.
I'd have thought that building more DDG-51's, while coming uop with an evolutionary follow-on for the Tico class would have been a better use of our tax money, as well as a means to keepo our skilled shipbuilders at work.
Rather, we are to have a great bloody ship, the size of Graf Spee, with the armour and weapons of a Flower-Class corvette, and the usefulness of neither.
Lovely.
England needs a Prime Minister named Nigel.
Ahem...
1) Pass a constitutional ammendment allowing non-US born citizens to become President
2) Elect Nigel as POTUS.
Sierra Hotel, Nigel! Take no prisoners and eat the wounded!!!!
I guess for PLAN submariners happiness is Zumwalt escorted by pair or trio of LCS without ASW modules...
Sadly, voting on laws of economics doesnt suspend them. Beauty of un-elected technocrats is that they can say truth to the voters without fear of being fired by them.. And if you don't co-opt Germany into Europe, you will end having to fight them again. Nation-states of Europe brought us 2 world wars. If EU project fails, there will be another major war on the continent sooner or later.
And Mr Nigel hates Frau Merkel, because he knows he would not get a tenth of her votes in future president of the USE vote. Classic example of cheap nationalistic populism. In Greece everybody is blaming crisis on Germans in Germany on Greeks, easy way of pointing guilty ones: damn filthy foreigners.
"<span>Beauty of un-elected technocrats is that they can say truth to the voters without fear of being fired by them.</span>"
E40; I would think the Europeans more than any would recognize the danger of that. "Un-elected technocrats" describes exactly the type of person the Fascists and Communists had running their governments. When you don't fear your citizens, then you will do what you want to them. In the end, you can rely
(cont) on the ballot box, or the gun. That is one of the more interesting nuances of the American 2nd Amendment to our Constitution. It was designed as a fail-safe against politicians who decided that they did not need the consent of the people to rule. If government became too opporessive - it cannot force its control when the people are armed without doing things that would deligitimize it in the extreme.
Perfect? Not even close. Effective? Well .... we do have the longest functioning Constitution on the planet and are doing well. Even during the War Between the States - the North still held a free and fair election; and good for them.
Europe though seems to want to repeat its mistakes. The governing class will though because the balance of the people on the continent will let them. I guess the serf mentality hasn't completely faded. Not a shock, as all the excitable and freedom loving kids from the villages left for America over a century ago. They are us and you are left with the compliant.
One of the best observers of the USA was Otto von Bismarck. A few of my favorite quotes of his:
- "<span>There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.</span>
Another quote who I think is from Bismarck but I cannot find the reference, says something to the effect that the American character is what it is because for centuries the most restless, ambitious and rebellious young people from each village in Europe left to come to America because they could do nothing in the village they were destined to work and die in.
That is the story of my line. Most of my ancestors came here in the 1600s and early 1700s after being on the losing end of various rebellions in Europe. I think that is where I get my flintyness.
Unelected burearcrats? Wouldn't go over well here. Then again, neither do Nazis of Communists. Sure we have a couple, but they will never go anywhere or ever get power. Even if they did - it wouldn't be long before the American people, city by city and then state by state would run them out. Run them out an the end of a gun.
As designed.
<span>Sure we have a couple [Communists], but they will never go anywhere or ever get power. </span>
Current occupant of the White House is from that end of the Socialist-Communist-Fascist politcal spectrum.
Much of what Mr. Farage said could apply equally to the Federal Reserve. I wonder if he is Keynesian.
As did mine: Great-great-great-great-Grand Pere Adler who became Audler when he pisses his Yiddish friends off by marrying a darkeyed Cajun girl figured he couldn't do so well in Germany. Glad he did, else I probably wouldn't be here today for the obvious reasons.
You say that the EU must have Germany to prevent another continental war...yet what happens, as Nigel is afraid of, if German dominates the EU? No offense, but the Germans STILL have an almost genetic dislike of Slavs and all things to the East...including Poland. One would think that it would worry you as well.
True beauty of the US system is that incorporates enough checks and balances (representatives, senate, presidential veto and supreme court to review on constitution compatibility) that it is very hard to hijack with simple populist rhetoric...
<span>Unless you have the erstwhile Solicitor General as a serving SCOTUS Judge, and refuses to recuse herself from a decision in which she violates clearly the tenets of 28 USC Sect 455.</span>
CDR, I strongly disagree with Farage. The point about Merkel and Germany is the cheapest rhetoric I ever heard. Germany finds itself in the role of EU savior almost against its will.
The EUR is a sound concept, and one that was in fact long overdue. Do I have to remind the Americans here that between 1776 and 1792 (?) almost all US states had their own petty armies, ambassadors in Europe and... currency?
What went wrong is that there WAS a set of stringent conditions, the so-called Convergency Pact, that were allowed to go unobserved. Or otherwise falsified. The Convergency Pact stated a.o. that for a country to enter the EMU (European Monetary Union), the budget deficit should not exceed three per cent of GDP, and national debt not 60% of GDP.
My own country, Belgium, was allowed in the EMU because (socialist) ministers applied an ingenuous set of tricks like, say, selling enormous state assets (public infrastructure a.o.) the year prior to the EUR introduction. The result was that the deficit was for just one year 'acceptable'.
Belgium never succeed in achieving the 60% norm. Yet it was allowed.
Come to think of it, I don't recall ANY country in fact which fulfilled the conditions. And that's where it went wrong. If the coach establishes the rules and then doesn't control whether his players follow them, chaos will ensue. Which is what's happening.
*never succeeded*
Sorry.
Outlaw,
I guess I didn't take the comments about Germany in the way you did. I believe he is right, and made reference to Merkel's (and Germany's) reluctance.
Nevertheless, he hits upon one of the great ironies of our age. That, after two world wars and a few smaller ones over the previous two centuries, Germany is going to be dominant in Europe. And will understandably want to have some say in how these other EU nations burn through German money after yet another bailout.
Your point about maintaining the tenets of the Convergency Pact is a good one, which seems something that was not done in a single instance. If that had been insisted upon, perhaps the EU and EB would have had a chance of working. But alas, they consciously didn't enforce.
There is a massive difference between the 13 Colonies that became the United States, and the formation of the EU. Our nation was not founded on an opportunistic burst of Euro-socialism, in which countries with profligate spending habits wanted to band with more austere ones in order to play a continental shell game with unsustainable economic policies. Remember, these are largely nations more than happy to allow the United States to fund virtually all their National defense (except Germany, UK, and France).
The failure of the EU is the national-scale failure of the "one-worlder" vision, and a case study for the inevitable collapse of socialist-communist economic models, regardless of scale.
URR, okay, but I would wager that the impetus to form a European Union was initially, INDEED, founded on lofty ideals. With the not spoken out loud goal of harnessing Germany's economic prowess in some kind of an entente instead of leaving it to itself and getting it tempted once again to dominate western Europe. Right in the beginning there were no welfare states.
These came only afterwards. But I seem to discern a similar evolution in the US.
And I regret that apparently not a single American is willing to consider the similarities between the integration of the (initially) 13 colonies and the European integration. I think it's a viable comparison, with the main difference being the weight of history (for the Euros).
I believe you are mistaken trying to compare the 13 Colonies to the formation of the EU. The Colonies did not band together because of a fear of domination by one of their own, but by European powers.
While the origins of the EU may be loftily considered, the evolution of the organization into the early 1990s had a very distinctly socialist bent. The expansion from the original six countries and the heavy industry compacts of the 1950s became an organization with four and a half times the original number of member nations, with relatively unproductive and non-competitive socialist governments and economies. The adoption of the Euro was pure folly, as the strength of the ersatz-currency would be entirely on the shoulders of the stronger nations, with the weaker economies on for the ride.
The collapse of the EU and Euro is a playing out in macro national-level of the very thing our own government is facing. The takers banding together with the producers, which allows them to take ever more, until finally the producers break, or are unwilling to exhaust themselves for someone else's largesse, and the entire structure comes crashing down.
I can barely contain myself how much I agree with this man. Friends, my family, and probably your family, paid a heavy price in blood when the German machine got rolling. When the Germans think they are being gipped financially, they react with arms. Period. We're not going down this road again. God help us if we go down this road again.
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