Michael B. Duff

Congressman Ron Paul today issued the following statement on Michael Steele’s recent comments that Afghanistan is a war of President Obama’s choosing: “I would like to congratulate Michael Steele for his leadership on one of the most important issues of today. He is absolutely right: Afghanistan is now Obama’s war. During the 2008 campaign, Obama was out in front in insisting that more troops be sent to Afghanistan. Obama called for expanding the war even as he pretended to be a peace candidate.

"We succeeded in taking a five-bar display and reducing it to one bar by doing that," Webb says. "But the call remained solid and never dropped."

Ah, our brave politicians. After running up unsustainable levels of debt for decades, their response is…do nothing and wait for the election. How we vote in the next couple cycles will determine how the pols respond. If we want them to cut spending and deal honestly with the crisis, we have to reward them for it. If we punish them for doing the right thing, or if we reward them for doing nothing, the farce will continue until creditors force the issue.

I really like this thread. Ordinary people trying to explain things to each other. I wish more of the Internet could be like this.

What the syndicalist considers the most serious defect of the capitalist system and disparages as the brutality and callousness of autocratic profit-seekers is precisely the outcome of the supremacy of the consumers. Under the competitive conditions of the unhampered market economy the entrepreneurs are forced to improve technological methods of production without regard to the vested interests of the workers. The employer is forced never to pay workers more than corresponds to the consumers' appraisal of their achievements. If an employee asks for a raise because his wife has borne him a new baby and the employer refuses on the ground that the enfant does not contribute to the factory's effort, the employer acts as the mandatary of the consumers. These consumers are not prepared to pay more for any commodity merely because the worker has a large family.

For religious skeptics, the “BibleThumper” iPhone app boasts that it “allows the atheist to keep the most funny and irrational Bible verses right in their pocket” to be “always ready to confront fundamentalist Christians or have a little fun among friends.”

Ireland climbed out of recession on Wednesday with the economy returning to growth in the first quarter, after suffering one of the deepest downturns of any advanced industrialised economy. Ireland’s return to growth, in spite of having undertaken a huge fiscal retrenchment over the past two years which prolonged the downturn, will provide encouragement to other European economies facing up to tackling rising public deficits.

A state appellate court on Friday sided with the Schwarzenegger administration in its attempt to temporarily impose the federal minimum wage on tens of thousands of state workers.

Noam Chomsky: Suppose someone facing starvation accepts a contract with General Electric that requires him to work 12 hours a day locked into a factory with no health-safety regulations, no security, no benefits, etc. And the person accepts it because the alternative is that his children will starve. Fortunately, that form of savagery was overcome by democratic politics long ago. Should all of those victories for poor and working people be dismantled, as we enter into a period of private tyranny (with contracts defended by law enforcement)? Not my cup of tea.

This comment is my attempt to figure out how an anarcho-syndicate society would handle a lifeboat situation.