overtone

Occasionally you will throw in aspects of these images that dominate your responses, and I (at least) am reminded once again that this world you have created to reason from is formed of delusions. You are always (at least, I can't think of a counterexample) wrong, about me. You presume attitudes and opinions and opinions alien to me, assign me characteristics I do not possess, throw readings into my posts in conflict with the very wording of them to get them to align with your presumptions, and so forth. Quite often these basic errors comprise a view of yourself that I am supposed to hold, that someone of my image would hold. That is never going to work as an answer or response to my actual posting. You are off on the wrong foot, guessing from bad information about a reality largely irrelevant here. And this costs you allies for your causes, as well as engaging you in futility. When I propose the Republican Party as America's biggest problem, I mean just that: the Republican Party. I don't mean your neighbors are worthless people. I don't mean that everything somebody thinks the Party "stands for" is a bad idea. I mean the thing itself, the entity, the legally incorporated thing, has become a bad thing and is doing a great deal of harm to America.

Signing on with W and Cheney is proof of unsound judgment - unless simple personal advancement in power and money was one's original goal, in which case it may have been a calculated risk. Rice seems to have had a crush of some kind on W, or at least respected him to the point of being a bit starry-eyed about the frat boy and his strutting incompetence, or possibly faking that? Either way, not a recommendation. Oil company execs in general don't have governing skills - big oil's a brutal game; it's like promoting your non-commissioned officers to high command. Colin Powell was one of the military officers involved in the My Lai coverup and Vietnam war disinformation generally, and his career has followed that path ever since - from Iran-Contra to the sanctions against Iraq, he's been carrying water and fronting "integrity" for the scum of the earth his whole political life. His failure to do anything about the chickenhawks' establishment of Gitmo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib and the rest, for example (directly in his wheelhouse, his area of expertise and connections) was completely in character. He does have some visible independence of mind, so he might have broken out a bit and made a sort of ok President once he got above that crowd he was in, but it's not the way to bet. Nobody in the W&Cheney administration would make a likely candidate, except maybe one of those who resigned quietly early on. There were a couple. As far as finding those of sound judgment and integrity both among the upper echelons of the Republican Party - nah. Gingrich cleaned house back in the early 90s, got rid of anyone who survived Reagan and Bush with their souls undamaged. And then came W. It's not easy to give full credit to just how foul that administration was, or its allies in Congress. There's nobody left fit to govern in that entire Party, at least on the national level. A Republican of integrity and sound judgment in governance would have to come from the ranks of the unknown, local.

The owner of the land should have major control over it. In the case of the national public range, that owner is the Federal government. Or as my Mom used to say to little kids who were acting like the Bundys: "You know it isn't yours. So put it back. " As far as control of your health care, you should have as much control as possible. Beyond that your family. Beyond that your doctor. One way to do that is to have the federal - or some community - government pay for it, and then via democratic control of them make sure operational control is ceded to you, your family, your doctor. There are other ways. One of the ways to lose control of your medical care is to set things up so the recipient pays as they go - since only the very wealthy among the sick, injured, young, and old, people can pay as they go, the rest lose access. You cannot control what you don't have. Another way is to set up corporate insurance - to cover the payment problem - but fail to govern the insurer. The insurer then controls your medical care, with an interest in extracting as much money from you and paying as little to doctors etc as possible. and so forth. I never said that America's biggest problem was small, or easy. btw: Nothing you have assumed about me or "my ideas" is accurate. Nothing. Do you realize that? How dependent on delusion and defensive presumption you have become in this matter - an entire world built of strawmen? Like this: Again with the "hate" bs. Does your world contain any other negative assessment or judgment or emotion? Do you hate everything and everybody you don't think is behaving well, and that's why you project hatred into everybody else? For the last few decades the Republican Party has increasingly become opposed to almost everything good that America stands for. This is demonstrable - one can make a list of what good America supposedly stands for, and check off the overwhelming evidence of growing Republican Party opposition. (You even did a little of that, above - only instead of crediting America with those virtues, you credited the Republican Party!) It has reached a crisis stage, now, with the nature of the current batch of Republican Presidential candidates having become impossible to camouflage. What do you intend to do about that? Dude: what goes through your mind when you type the words "out of network", and then type the words "insurance company - - nothing whatsoever to do with it"? And why are you complaining about free market capitalism setting prices as it pleases? Do you know how many people are ever gouged for being "out of network" in the other 30+ First World health care systems? The entitlements we actually managed to hold on to for fifty years did do the trick. Old people are not the poorest of all Americans, eating pet food as their only source of affordable protein, living in penury and squalor far from the reach of medical care or even pain relief, dying years before their time of things like malnutrition and abscessed teeth. Thank you, Social Security and Medicare. The prosperity founded by the GI bills and other veteran's benefits - the free college, the government subsidized house, all the rest - although limited to white men in general, is still with us. They have been much reduced by Reagan era budget cuts and Republican mismanagement and the Second Great Republican Crash, but they sure did the trick for white men while they lasted. Unless, of course, the Republican Party honchos don't actually have valid arguments, good judgment, or even good intentions. That is a matter to be determined by evaluating evidence - not assumed, as if it were some principle of the universe that the Republican Party was well staffed and controlled by the benevolent and the wise. Why is it that when you place your blind trust and unexamined faith in some batch of politicians, it's the Ws and Cheneys - why not the Feingolds and Sanders's? Let's try it and see - the Republican gerrymandering of the past couple of decades has done obvious harm, and it's not what America stands for: let's revoke it and try impartial redistricting. Any objection?

Joke? Parody? What's with all this yak about "hate"? And what do you suppose it would take to get you to read the following words: -> Republican Party <- . Note the capital letters. They are present throughout my posts. There's no way you could have missed them. The Republican Party has demonstrated a complete lack of concern for any of those except two: protection of the personal wealth of the very wealthy, protection of the rights of white people to carry firearms. They've trashed the military, ballooned the size of the government, abetted violence and greed rather than "Christian" values, gone far out of their way to interfere in many aspects of private life, set up cartels and undermined free markets everywhere, exacerbated the threat of global terrorism to the point that the Islamic versions now threaten to take over entire countries; and over it all, the most flagrant and spotlit and baroque pile of horsepucky on the current political scene, the notion that this Republican Party stands for "personal accountability". There is nothing more obviously lacking in the modern Republican Party than personal accountability. This is an entire Party built on denial of everything its officials and politicians have ever done, revision of its own history and behavior, and enforced amnesia concerning anything it cannot deny or revise. There is no more striking feature and characteristic of the modern Republican Party than its total lack of even a pretense of personal accountability. Nobody in that Party is held accountable by that Party for anything they've ever done or said - not its officials, not its pundits, not its politicians, not its major funders, not its associated media organizations and figures, none of 'em.

You're "understanding" (when you can't even get my posts straight) is irrelevant. The Republican Party is America's biggest problem right now no matter what role my supposed human nature had in identifying it. Thank you Republican Party Reaganomics and Republican Party warmongering. Another little gift from America's biggest problem. That Party will keep on enabling profiteers by ballooning the US debt, public and private, until they are stopped or they create another crash. Dude, for the umpteenth time: good and timely medical care for everybody is cheaper. Everywhere it's been tried, every time it's been tried, it's been cheaper. In the other 33 First World setups it's cheaper. Medical care, like roads and sewers, is something that pays off, saves you money in the long run. And "Our current system is bloated and whacky" does not mean we should stick with it. It means our current system should be changed. It should be changed to something that's cheaper and works better, like other people have. but we are bigger and more diverse than some smaller, homogeneous nation in Europe. Most of the countries of Europe are bigger and more diverse than most of the States of the US. The Republican Party is currently losing its marbles over 11 million immigrants into a country of 300 million people. And most of them speak English. They have jobs. They pay taxes. They aren't even Muslim.

There is a reality. There is not just two sides, ok, but also a physical reality involved here. In that reality, 34 governments are already running universal health care setups that they can afford, despite being much poorer countries than the US. In that reality, the US government is already running a huge single payer insurance program, easily capable of incorporating every citizen, that is much cheaper and slightly better performing than the private ones - Medicare. And that is in spite of Medicare being forbidden, by law, to drive costs down lower than the inefficient and high cost private insurance companies can follow. In that reality, the drug companies are greedy and the insurance company executives are greedy and the Republican Party officials and media folks are stupid and cruel for lying about the situation. Well, yes. Don't you agree? Why else would they be working so hard to repeal something that was their idea in the first place? The new status quo, the one introduced in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, is not working. Seriously not working. Please. That's not a promise your Republican Party will, or even can, keep. What the Republican Party will do if a Dem wins is the same thing it's been doing for eight years now - lie, slander, cheat, steal, thieve, encourage violence, vandalize the machinery of government, damage the United States in its domestic and foreign efforts for their own political advantage and - especially - provide tax and regulatory advantages for their corporate backers.

As a result of considerable argument and passionate debate - the matter was more than a little controversial: http://www.oddlyhistorical.com/2015/04/19/religious-objections-lightning-rods/ " In 1767, some 16 years after Franklin’s invention, priests at the Church of San Nazaro in Brecia ignored repeated requests to install what they believed to be a blasphemous device. That year, lightning struck the church tower has it likely had many times before, but this time the Republic of Venice had decided to store thousands of pounds of gunpowder in the church vaults. The strike ignited the stores, and the resulting explosion leveled 1/6 of the city and killed 3,000 people. "

Two advantages to a shared belief in certain forms of access to an all-governing spiritual realm: it provides a way of limiting exploitation of a resource and thus avoiding a Hardin's Common Tragedy; it provides a way of randomizing exploitation of stochastically variable resources and thus maximizing it within those limits. So a tribe with a sound and deeply coherent set of spiritual beliefs mediated by its wisest and most capable individuals would have the means of more often avoiding suboptimal equilibria enforced by debilitation (starvation, disease, etc), and would instead be more often presenting its neighbors with a people closer to the maximum strength and health of human population a given level of technology on a given landscape could support. The underlying circumstance is this: the world is very complex, deeply patterned, and these patterns incorporate randomness. Whatever one's terms or approaches to these patterns may be, they are functionally equivalent to what we call spirituality or they are too shallow.

From the heritage of the terms: level of organization addressed. Like team and players, forest and trees. Note the one is singular, the other plural - swapping that enlightens. Prediction: That disappears with casual use - the way "troops" and "soldiers" sort of merged. So you have to read for meaning.

I did some research into an article I remembered on this topic, a thorough treatment including some suggestions for amelioration: https://books.google.com/books?id=8nx8v2FVZ24C&pg=PA212&lpg=PA212&dq=dave+baRRY+LEFT+LANE+HATS&source=bl&ots=lrX9uQz228&sig=b7kuV4xp3MrYpYd5QyQCjblap9k&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwit_-mIv8LKAhVV9mMKHRMdCy8Q6AEIJDAB#v=onepage&q=dave%20baRRY%20LEFT%20LANE%20HATS&f=false As is my habit, I include a couple of things that have occurred to me over the decades of professional driving I have experienced, matters the experts and their data seem to have overlooked. One of them is this: for low-ability drivers, the left lane is easier. You don't have to handle merge ramps as often (even in the Twin Cities the pioneer highway designers and their crayons appear to have been replaced by a new generation, who have come to the realization that left hand ramps are trouble and should be avoided), you don't have to change lanes until you get close to your exit, and you only have scary traffic on one side of the car (and it's the other side, not right next to you). Why does that matter? Because in a place with such lousy public transit as most of the US, the roads are full of people essentially forced - against their wishes and capabilities - into the role of car pilot. The low-ability driver is just trying to survive out there - and in the US there are a whole hell of a lot of them. All those grandmas and immigrants and frail elderly men and teenage screwoffs and middle aged Korean ladies you see on the trains and buses of Europe? In the US they are driving cars on the freeway.

There is little role for the current major religions in science. Nevertheless, science - the body of people who are scientists and their embedding - needs a religion. That it has none, at the moment, is a source of problems.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/water-bears-glass-all-full Something spotted before, but not understood quite as well: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19732016 I like water bears, and not just because they look like the Aunts in "A Wrinkle In Time". ( photo: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/water-bears’-genetic-borrowing-questioned) To say that this is possiby the coolest thing a water bear can do is to say something. Maybe because human packaging is almost always designed to prevent water from affecting the contents, this comes from left field - but methinks those guys need to get hold of a patent attorney.

You don't have to think about it that way. Think about it like this: the white people are deadbeats, who haven't fulfilled their end of a bargain, and the black people are the creditors who are owed reparations. For example, black people's parents were prevented - by law, and by custom, and by brute violence - from being able to help their children despite hard work and prudence. Their surplus from their efforts was denied to them. So the white people who prevented the parents from being able to provide owe the children what the parents would otherwise have provided. Another one: white people were given a good deal of wealth by the US government, especially in the Homestead Acts and similar legislation, and that has been the basis of much of their subsequent prosperity. Black people were denied access to these government handouts, because they were black. So the US government owes black people a proportional fraction of that wealth, plus interest, to provide an equivalent opportunity for their current endeavors. Another one: white people have been the beneficiaries of significant advances in medical care and treatment of trauma and disease in children especially. Black people who are adults today were prevented from taking advantage of much of this (iirc it's Chris Rock who tells the story of his mother going in secret after dark to the back door of the local veterinarian for medicine and injury treatment - if she had gone to the front door and been seen being welcomed, the local white people would have stopped taking their dogs and cats to that vet). At the same time, black children were relegated to unhealthy circumstances, high pollution zones, vermin infested housing, etc. Many health problems that afflict black people today, not to mention the poor health and untimely deaths of parents etc, stem from denial of remedy in the past. So the white people who caused this owe these black people medical care for these extra afflictions, and remediation for some of the side effects. So it's not so much a matter of who "deserves" what, but who owes a debt they are obliged to make good if they are able. Feel better? Deepities should not be carelessly dismissed. I just found out yesterday that I had been too quick in my dismissal of the deepity "There is no "I" in team". I had been taking it to refer to the necessity of selflessness in contributing to team efforts, and inane therefore, but I was corrected by a more alert friend's pointing out that it really meant one could avoid accountability and blame by hiding one's sloth and incompetence within a team identity. That's a valuable insight.

It's not based on the "other side" telling the truth.

If you checked, you read that he did not normalize relations with the Chinese. That took seven more years, and the bulk of the work was done by Carter. The SALT treaty Nixon had been negotiating since '69 and got signed a couple months later in that election year was of course in the interest of China as well - the Chinese wanted Soviet nuclear capability curbed, for obvious reasons. So if Nixon's visit helped close the deal that was an ancillary benefit for Beijing, to add to the important negotiated benefits along those lines Beijing obtained - win/win. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Communiqué In any event: not Reagan. All this good stuff - diplomatic relations with China, SALT treaty, etc - was handed to Reagan.

He opened Hong Kong. At most. And gave away the store to do it. They had him pegged from the gitgo - he needed prestige, status, could not afford (personally or professionally) to walk away. He'd already brought the TV cameras into it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Nixon_visit_to_China (Notice, for example, that the major US effort of the visit - obtaining Chinese pressure on Vietnam to agree to US terms for ending the Vietnam War - went nowhere). Carter cut the deals that opened mainland China to US commercial relationships. He was hampered somewhat by Nixon's opening bid, but still made a reasonably good bargain of it over all. And the main point: Reagan was handed a China in "normal" diplomatic relations with the US, separated from the Soviet Union, open for profitable business relationships with his California associates and Wall Street backers, and so forth. He did not accomplish that, Carter did.

There aren't any moderates worth mentioning, in the Republican Party. There isn't a single Republican Congressman, Governor, or Presidential candidate who can turn his back on the Trump/Cruz/Carson core of that Party and still win election. There is no moderate wing, or group, of any size. Trump's support is not fringe, neither is Cruz's, neither is Carson's. The fringe candidates on the stage in the Republican debates were the likes of Jeb Bush and John Kasich. The people "led" by this dork https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reince_Priebusare the conservative equivalent of the ivory tower - not really in communication with the unwashed masses they've been tapping for votes via hired professionals. Revisionist history is when somebody credits Reagan with great popularity, or credits Reagan with opening China, and the like. (Nixon opened Hong Kong, stashed a mistress there, and got fleeced by the Chinese government. Jimmy Carter opened mainland China, and cut a reasonably good deal that unfortunately depended on nobody screwing up the US tax system. Yes, that Jimmy Carter. Not Reagan, Carter. Jimmy Carter was a more accomplished and better governing president than Reagan, especially in foreign policy areas). One problem with crediting Reagan for the fall of the Soviet Empire is that it blinds you to the actual events - which included Reagan's entire administration getting caught totally by surprise (apparently, they had been believing their own bs Star Wars defense industry trough-filling hype about the looming threat of Soviet world domination) and botching some really important foreign policy opportunities and threats (right there is where the US probably blew it with Iran and Iraq as well as Cuba and Yugoslavia, for example). Here's the rule of thumb: fascists do not make the trains run on time. They are not, as they present themselves to be, competent at governing things as complex as States. Fascism is not a good governing ideology. The illusion of competence fostered by the confidence of these clowns is what you need a factually accurate account of events to dissipate, and falling for their pitch is a major hazard of revising one's history according to their bombast and deluded rants.

Of course not. And it's never been an issue. That's hardly "tacit". That's the assertion. In the US, there have always been lots of guns. Household availability of a firearm, in particular, has been at times and in regions something approaching universal - at least, among the white and not brutally impoverished in the country. That there are - in some regions especially - significantly more guns per capita now is something I've posted myself, in the course of pointing out that neither the density nor the pervasiveness of guns tracks gun violence very well - especially the types of gun violence most easily addressed by a Federal government. That the guns have more firepower is also something I've posted repeatedly concerning, although my take is more nuanced - I point to the well-engineered handgun (the high density reservoir of considerable lethality invented in the US long after the Constitution was written, of little militia or hunting use, and for various reasons uniquely adopted, almost as an icon, by the US and its culture) as a key aspect of the current insanity in the US. So where are you going? Because the "tacit implications" of side comments like this: lead directly to that deadlock I keep pointing at.

This way you call "our way" is a recent and significant change to what was "our way" from 1935 until 1980. And the change is visible in every marker of prosperity and sound economic management you can find - since the changes of Reaganomics, we have been in a slide, simultaneously stagnant in wages and accumulating public debt. The WWII and aftermath "our way" worked a lot better than the Reaganomics "our way"has been working. And the reasons why are not hidden. Why do you think the various tax breaks and loopholes carefully written into the law, every single one of which reduces the absolute and relative burden on the wealthy significantly, were intended to benefit "society"? And why would such a silly and soon-revealed and damaging mistake in intention, if it ever existed, be a good thing?

So wtf did you think was happening when Palin herself was the candidate, and the Republican crowd was bringing stuffed monkeys painted up in blackface with bones in their noses and Palin-inspired lipstick ("lipstick on a pig" remember?) to the Palin rallies? Or when Rush Limbaugh was crowned big daddy at CPAC and endorsing W&Cheney? The Republicans went the fascist, xenophobic route in 1980. They made it Party policy in 1992. It's not a route any more - it's the Party identity. It's reverse graduated for capital gains income and social security. Mitt Romney had advance warning in 2012, adjusted his chosen released year of tax returns to look as heavily taxed as possible, and still paid less than 14% total - about what a self-employed housecleaner pays in Social Security alone. Don't forget that guy B is receiving government assistance, that all the money he pays to employees is being invested for a return and subtracted from his taxes at the same time, and so forth. But that's not the main point, or even the second one. The main point is that guy B should be paying enough to cover the government's bills, whatever that percentage is - that's how a sane economy is structured: the winners pay for the game. The question is not what is fair, but what is necessary to pay the bills. When President Shitforbrains starts two land wars in Asia, his buddies in the boardrooms - the guys who financed his campaign and backed his career - face a tax hike, not a tax break, under responsible government. And the second point is that guy B should be prevented from accumulating too much wealth compared with guy A, so that inequality of income and wealth does not choke the economy and make everyone worse off. Free market economies and capitalist societies work poorly at high levels of income and wealth inequality - the exchange mechanism that is supposed to keep things efficient breaks down; too much of the surplus production goes to a limited and localized set of benefits for a few people, starving the rest of the economy of investment and innovation.

Ha! If I had asserted that it would have been mockery, gratuitous insult. Fox doesn't copyright its talking points. It doesn't even write most of them - radio jocks and think tanks and media operations financed by the same people who brought you the modern Republican Party do that, they feed and frame CNN and CNBC as well. You have no other sources of information ? I don't say that "we need such a thing", I say you, and everybody you care about, and the entire country you claim to favor, would be better off with one of them. And they aren't all single payer insurance, btw - most are, but they vary. I'm not arguing that, but it's true, and it was pretty clearly going to be true from the time Romney designed it to prevent socialized medicine. That's also obviously true, and I'm not arguing that either. That's how the US does it, as well. Only badly, with higher taxes and higher employer costs and higher beneficiary costs for lower quality of medical care, and at the same time covering all the costs and side effects of not providing standard medical care to large numbers of its citizens. The highest costs, and lowest levels of benefit, of the 34 First World medical care systems. The numbers say that if the US had adopted the Greek system, just as and when it was adopted in Greece, we would currently have significantly better medical care for about 2/3 of the money - including tax money - we currently spend. And the reason we are currently stuck with the worst medical care system in the Western industrialized world, is that the combination of racial bigotry and conservative rightwing corporate power now concentrated in the current Republican Party has been blocking all attempts to improve it - the best anyone has ever been able to get past that barrier is Obamacare, a Republican designed system carefully set up to protect the corporate profits of the various corporate interests involved in the status quo, while boosting delivery of medical care to some citizens of the country. So we add that to the damage bill from this dumpster fire of a political Party - like Cubans unable to afford their own cigars, or Nigerians unable to afford the oil that's being pumped from under their houses, Americans cannot obtain the medical care largely developed and made possible by their own tax dollars and educational systems, that citizens of other countries routinely enjoy at a cost they can easily afford.

And they used the rally monkey image from the Angels baseball team - very low ethical standards, there.

And if it was awash with "half that many", it is now with double. Are you, like a couple others, objecting to my use of "awash"? I am as above and always and explicitly quite willing to use another term for the situation described. Or are you going somewhere with this? You, explicitly, were. Like this: I'm not asking the NRA. The NRA is among the polarized extremists currently deadlocked on this matter in the US, and there's nothing the reasonable can do about it except wait 'til they've cooled off and we can get a word in edgewise. btw: as pointed out earlier, "families" and "households" are not interchangeable in this analysis. Even worse is to make historical comparisons while interchanging those terms.

Hmmmm. It is, kind of. It's a significant vulnerability, both of the State facing other States, and the citizenry facing its own government. Food insecurity has been operating as leverage against populations all over the world for a long time. The key for the State, of course, is to make sure this vulnerability is in the right hands and under control. If that cannot be accomplished domestically - if, as in Russia or China recent past, it turns out that people so badly governed physically cannot feed themselves even if permitted by the State, say - then the nearest option is military force (other people have food), and failing that acquiescence to subjugation (other powers have control of food).

And if you - as the economic analysis suggests, as common sense indicates, as the partial experience of sectors of the US have demonstrated (the Republican Congress had to pass a law preventing Medicare from lowering drug prices in the US), and as everyone else in the entire First World of medical care - everyone else, all 34 countries, without a single exception - have found to be the case in reality - wind up paying lower taxes and lower co-pays and lower premiums and lower deductibles, while receiving better medical care by adopting any of the 34 single payer based / nonprofit / taxpayer grounded national health care systems in current superior existence, or even just expanding Medicare as already developed in the US, then you will have been provided, by a competent government, a very valuable service well worth your support. Amirite? "The people" regulate the behavior of banks, and corporations, by establishing a government and employing regulators whose job it is to do the full time and highly skilled work necessary. That's how it's done. There is no other way to do it. There is no substitute for competent government acting in the service of the ordinary citizen. You voted for W. Twice. Thereby almost destroying any hope you had of ever seeing that agenda in practice in the US. Did you learn anything? If you vote for any of the current batch of Republican politicians running for any office in this country, you will have voted for lower standards of teaching science and the arts, further spread of drug abuse and crime and incarceration, less equitable enforcement of current laws, greater immunity of the rich from personal responsibility, rejection of any efforts to "question" the medical profession, further and even larger increases in the expense of health care, greater reliance on litigation and lawsuits in health care and all other professional fields, and government so obviously devoted to creating winners and losers that entire factions of the American public simply check out - set up communities and societies that operate outside and contrary to the government of the State. A Second World country, headed for Third World. The richest Third World, banana republic country ever seen on the planet. And if you think your pension will survive another Republican Crash like we saw in 1929 and 2008, you will be disappointed. Raiding pension funds is child's play for an unregulated Wall Street.