time*treat's Blog

Before political correctness took over ... and we first meet BeBe's kids.

 

The very end of the movie "House Party" ... Lesson: Bad behavior has consequences.

By Eric Janszen

Most reasonably aware North Americans have, like me, watched this mess develop for over 20 years. Credit was substituted for savings. Two incomes were substituted for one. Other people's savings were substituted for our own.

These past 20 years have been like a long bus ride into the middle of a desert without food or water, with the driver all along telling us that, no, we are not heading into a desert but traveling along a long stretch of beach that leads to an ocean with palm trees and swimming pools, we just can't see the water yet.

All along the way the skeptics look out the window and say, "We're going the wrong way," and, "Shouldn't we turn around or at least stop to pick up drinking water in case you're wrong?"

"Stop being so negative," yells the driver over his shoulder. "You don't understand neo-classical geography."

Meanwhile, the rest of the passengers in the bus sit watching Survivor on portable DVD players or reading about Britney Spears's hairstylist in The National Enquirer.

One day the bus runs out of gas. The driver gets out, looks around and says, "How about that. Here we are in the middle of the desert without food or water. Who could have known?"

He pulls out a cell phone and shortly a helicopter rescues him and his friends, leaving everyone else behind to fend for themselves.

The End

Postscript: Our leaders have driven our economy to the place economies eventually wind up that run on credit, discourage savings, and sold off productive capacity needed to generate new savings. Our readers have not listened to them but have saved their own food and water, metaphorically speaking, by staying out of debt and increasing their savings, even if this was not what everyone else was doing. Good for you. On the other hand, readers who are expecting a Mad Max world need to get a grip and re-read Are You a Doomer? Law abiding citizens do not turn into criminals overnight. Your town will not be run by warlords. There will be no wandering hoards of looters or ox-drawn Rolls Royces. That's Y2K stuff. Try to keep it in perspective, folks. Everything is going to get really, really slow for a while.

active links and replies: www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?p=79157

Doesn't Batiuk know people read the funnies for a good laugh?

If we want to read about death & disaster, we have the whole rest of the newspaper - world news, local news, obits, ... financials, ... Chicago sports.

Gonna stop calling them "comics" and start calling them "tragics".

JIM ROGERS: "Listen, we have to face reality, George. If you don't face reality and you sit there and twiddle along and believe Mr Bernanke that everything is OK, you are going to get hit by a two-by-four and it's going to hurt very, very, very badly, so I would urge you to be prepared."

Of course most people want to believe Ben "the-subprime-crisis-will-be-contained" Bernanke, no matter how many times he's been wrong prior. Somehow, this time, although it has never happened before, the gum'mint will "step in" and not make things worse. Slow learning and laziness will kill you.

Worth 1000 words of explaining commie-socialism vs capitalism ... or maybe NK is just practicing energy conservation.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/dprk/dprk-dark.htm

He became a heartland icon, delivering news and commentary with a distinctive Midwestern flavor. "Stand by for news!" he told his listeners. He was credited with inventing or popularizing terms such as "skyjacker," "Reaganomics" and "guesstimate."

September 4, 1918 – February 28, 2009

Broadcasting pioneer Paul Harvey dies at age of 90

A collectible is the kind of thing you thought was overpriced at 5 bucks, only to find out years later someone is willing to pay $500 for one in the original packaging, i.e. way more than the thing cost new.

There are too many things to collect that will never be more than conversation pieces: barbie dolls, old stamps, error coins, rare beanies, lionel trains, pez dispensers, antique cars, baseball cards, comic books. A few items in all of those categories have sold at amazing prices, but most items among them have not. It's just money spent.

I don't try to guess what the hot rare item is going to be 20 years hence; too subjective for me. Too many things that can suddenly lower the (so-called) value, like a scratch, a tear, water damage, or finding you paid big money for a counterfeit (ouch!). I don't want to have to be a specialist when I buy or find a specialist when I'm ready to sell.

These folks below feel they were ripped off. I'm not so sure...

 

I saw similar ads (see below) on tv and in print, and it seems to me they got exactly what was advertised in words and audio. 

I'm not sure if they were "cheated" or not. I do know that if enough people complain about a thing, even if they failed to RTFM, then the state AG will take their side.

They could have saved themselves a bit of grief by asking one simple question -- How do you put multiple colors on a (piece of metal) coin? That's what I thought, when I saw the ad. There were two answers; neither of which had me picking up the phone.

Treehuggers who put some of their own money and effort into what they believe in, are respectable ...

unlike certain speech-giving, carbon-taxing, blowhards.

 -- Proof that other english-speaking nations are run by idiots, too: From Australia --

They were labelled "law breakers", fined $50,000 (costing $100,000 after legal fees) and left emotionally and financially drained.

But seven years after the Sheahans bulldozed trees to make a fire break -- an act that got them dragged before a magistrate and penalised -- they feel vindicated. Their house is one of the few in Reedy Creek, Victoria, still standing.

The Sheahans' 2004 court battle with the Mitchell Shire Council for illegally clearing trees to guard against fire, as well as their decision to stay at home and battle the weekend blaze, encapsulate two of the biggest issues arising from the bushfire tragedy.

Do Victoria's native vegetation management policies need a major overhaul? And should families risk injury or death by staying home to fight the fire rather than fleeing?

Anger at government policies stopping residents from cutting down trees and clearing scrub to protect their properties is already apparent. "We've lost two people in my family because you d--kheads won't cut trees down," Warwick Spooner told Nillumbik Mayor Bo Bendtsen at a meeting on Tuesday night.

Although Liam Sheahan's 2002 decision to disregard planning laws and bulldoze 250 trees on his hilltop property hurt his family financially and emotionally, he believes it helped save them and their home on the weekend.

"The house is safe because we did all that," he said as he pointed out his kitchen window to the clear ground where tall gum trees once cast a shadow on his house.

"We have got proof right here. We are the only house standing in a two-kilometre area."

-------------------------------

The clearing was of trees located on their "own" property.

I'm doubting they'll be getting their money back.

full story at www.smh.com.au/national/fined-for-illegal-clearing-family-now-feel-vindicated-20090212-85bd.html

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.

Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.

She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.

“I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. “All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”

The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

While prosecutors say that Judge Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Judge Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled.
...
 If the court agrees to the plea agreement, both judges will serve 87 months in federal prison and resign from the bench and bar. They are expected to be sentenced in the next several months. Lawyers for both men declined to comment.

Since state law forbids retirement benefits to judges convicted of a felony while in office, the judges would also lose their pensions.

With Judge Conahan serving as president judge in control of the budget and Judge Ciavarella overseeing the juvenile courts, they set the kickback scheme in motion in December 2002, the authorities said.

They shut down the county-run juvenile detention center, arguing that it was in poor condition, the authorities said, and maintained that the county had no choice but to send detained juveniles to the newly built private detention centers.

Prosecutors say the judges tried to conceal the kickbacks as payments to a company they control in Florida.

full story at www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html?_r=3&emc=eta1

(This is going on around the country, folks. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?)

How Libs will "protect" you.

What about knives?

From the land of melamine milk and pet food, and poison-laced toys ...

To whom our congress bent over backward while our manufacturing workers were bent over forward ...

Where what we didn't ship over, in the form of jobs and factories, in the 90s ...

We ship over now, while we hunt at BigBoxMart for low, low prices, in the 00s ...

Next time you're eyeing a fur-trimmed jacket or that SomePetGoneMissing soup with the odd name....

Somehow....

It's not just for churches, anymore.

Stimulis^®

(See your doctor if you have hyper inflation lasting longer than four hours.)