 |
PM |  | |
Quote | | |
Reply | | |
Full Topic | |
| Joined: | Mon Nov 21st, 2005 |
| Location: | California USA |
| Posts: | 6399 |
| Status: |
Offline
|
| Mana: |    |
LIHEAP offers block grants to states so they can offer financial assistance to low-income households in order to meet home energy needs, mostly for heating. Most of its recipients are the elderly and disabled. The program is currently funded at more than $5 billion. Obama is calling for that to be slashed to $2.57 billion-roughly half. This life-or-death program, which literally can help prevent people from freezing to death, represents less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the proposed $3.7 trillion annual budget.
Compare this with the proposed military budget. "Defense spending" is a misnomer. Until 1947-48, the Pentagon was officially, and appropriately, called the War Department. In the proposed budget released on Valentine's Day, the Department of Defense request is $553 billion for the base budget, an increase of $22 billion above the 2010 appropriation. The White House has touted what it calls "$78 billion" in cuts that Defense Secretary Robert Gates is considering. But as the Institute for Policy Studies notes: "The Defense Department talks about cutting its own budget-$78 billion over five years-and most reporting takes this at face value. It shouldn't. The Pentagon is following the familiar tradition of planning ambitious increases, paring them back and calling this a cut."
The reader could expand on that theme, and apply that type of knowing, that understanding, to a wider vision, and do so by spending some time, some energy, and some power toward the perusal of a thing called:
Comprehensive Annual Financial Report
C A F R
Someone most certainly knows where all the money goes, to suggest otherwise is a curious suggestion. Who suggests otherwise, and why do they suggest otherwise?
Consider thinking from a very basic, base, and solid foundation, then peruse the subject matter tabled by Walter Burien, plopped on the table like a torturer might plop a severed limb onto your dinner table, to wake you up, let you really know what is going on, on your dime, and that foundation is this:
Honest, hard working, polite, agreeable, cooperating, innocent, People can, will, and do, create a whole lot of excess wealth. People can even create so much excess wealth that they can build Pyramids in their spare time, and they were powerful enough to be able to do that well before the invention and use of labor saving things like motors and motor fuel, or computers, or the internet.
The reason for this human power, this human capacity, and this human ability by which people can produce much more than they consume is, at least, three in number.
A. Division of labor (I bring home the food, you cook it)
B. Specialization (I get really, really, good at, bringing home the food)
C. Economies of scale (If I bring home enough food in one trip for 10 people, good, but if I bring home enough food for 1000 people, even better, since the cost, or the expense of the trip is divided by 1000 instead of 10)
All of those powerful advantages empower humans to be very good at creating and stockpiling excess wealth, for a rainy day, or to conduct aggressive wars for profit.
A. Honest working people increase their standard of living by investing their excess wealth toward more efficient ways of producing more wealth with less effort.
B. Legal criminals steal the excess wealth, use that power toward the maintenance of that power, to steal, including the financing of both sides in perpetual conflict, and the perpetuation of a boom and bust cycle whereby the excess wealth always flows from those who create it to those who steal it.
That is, in the words of Albert Einstein, as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Here:
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
Why are things made to be too complicated, on purpose?
A law that can only be understood by the enforcers is a law that will only benefit the enforcer?
How about an even simpler understanding as to why things are made too complicated, on purpose, and this quote comes from someone who earned his authority on the subject.
Alexandr I Solzhenitsyn
Let us not forget that violence does not and cannot flourish by itself; it is inevitably intertwined with LYING. Between them there is the closest, the most profound and natural bond: nothing screens violence except lies, and the only way lies can hold out is by violence. Whoever has once announced violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose lying as his PRINCIPLE. At birth, violence behaves openly and even proudly. But as soon as it becomes stronger and firmly established, it senses the thinning of the air around it and cannot go on without befogging itself in lies, coating itself with lying's sugary oratory. It does not always or necessarily go straight for the gullet; usually it demands of its victims only allegiance to the lie, only complicity in the lie.
The truth is one half, what is the other half, what constitutes the overly complex half, why is there fine print?
Who writes the fine print, and why, and if you asked them, would they answer with the truth, and who expects known liars to do anything but lie, who banks on them telling the truth, this time?
Who is fooling, who is fooled?
The capacity of producing and storing excess wealth exists, more wealth than can be imagined, what is the limit?
Falsehood.
Falsehood covers up all the other limitations.
Who produces falsehood, and why?
The prize in view is that unlimited capacity to produce and store excess wealth, and having seized that goal, what limits the laundry list of things to do to get it?
Torture is on that list, made by the people with that goal driving them.
Mass murder is on that list too.
The limit may be an end to the human species, as that too may be on the list of things to do, as each competitor who is after that same goal reaches for it.
Who has nuclear war, on the table, on their list of things to do, and if you find that person, what have you found?