I have no objection to enforcing the laws as such, though obviously, the Republican Party and Trump in particular clearly do NOT believe in enforcing the law consistently (they've made it clear they only want it enforced firmly against Democrats).

But in this kind of case, what I wonder, as a taxpayer who doesn't want my money misused, is whether the cost of chasing down who benefits from something unfairly, is actually SAVING money, or of it costs me far more, than allowing an occasional "freeloader" to slip by.

Everything I know about it, I learned from Donald Duck, who discusses it in a Disney short called Donald Duck in Mathemagicland.

As I understand it, it's based on a Greek idea that because a certain mathematical ratio is common in nature, that it must have magical qualities.

They believed that human constructions which utilized the ratio, would invariably be found to be optimally pleasing to the eye.

All of what I do which could be considered art, is in the realms of music and writing, rather than visual things, so I've never used it.

Here in the dating world especially, but more generally as well, it is often said that lying to someone is a reprehensible behavior, in and of itself.

That's what people SAY, anyway. Various politicians, famous artists, sports figures and so on, who have been caught lying about important things (even if only in their personal lives) have been pilloried and publicly criticized, for all my life. It is VERY common in the world of dating and mating, to see complaints about lies and liars be VERY high on almost everyones list of "red flags" or reasons to firmly reject and discard a potential mate.


But oddly, I've come to realize that most people do NOT actually oppose lying and liars. That includes many of the people who most loudly and stridently and righteously proclaim that they DO despise all who lie.

What I've actually found, is that most people really only dislike it when someone lies about something they care about deeply, or if they already don't like the liar, they will claim that the reason for their dislike IS the lies. Even though it isn't, really. They prove this, when they EXCUSE OR IGNORE lies from one person, while attacking them in someone else, and pretending it's all about principles.

What bothers me the most about this, is the overall dynamic of it all.

Donald Trump is as many of a certain kind are, who live on the fringes of the entertainment world, in that he avows and believes that behaving badly, rudely, crudely and carelessly, is in and of itself, a laudable technique for getting what he wants.

This is worst for us as a people, when this kind of attitude in people in leadership positions, leads to reactions from the rest of the society, of either excitement to mindless imitation and admiration, or equally poorly thought out, self-righteous opposition.

I've seen this play out very badly over the decades here, regardless of the political orientations of the people taking part.

Too many people who would recognize vile behavior as unacceptable, if it were coming from someone who they DIDN'T like, are either closing their eyes to it in Trump, or worse, PRAISING it.

Actually, the fact that the FBI found a way to avoid breaking down a door would be the absolutely least of my concerns, if I were being investigated for possible crimes, by the FBI.


And one of the many ways that mass media news sites have used over the decades to get people riled up enough to listen through commercials, is to say things such as to draw attention to the fact that the agents had a key, and using that to imply that some great conspiracy is afoot.

Most of the time, all there is to such things, is that the reporter didn't know what was going on, or misunderstood some guess that someone else made.

Well, it's a METAPHOR, after all.

I've never ACTUALLY burned an actual bridge, and besides, all the ones around here are made of concrete and metal.

When it comes to people, I think perhaps "don't add insult to injury" might be a better saying to attend to.

Every now and then, I've come across people who were in the midst of something like a personal "fad" approach to dealing with others, where they thought that in order to show that they were part of the "in crowd," so to speak, or that they were "strong," that they had to do more than simply say no or goodbye to would-be suitors or lovers. It's a bit similar to the developmental stage many young teens seem to go through, where they think that they have to ostentatiously insult someone who they don't want to date, rather than simply saying a polite "no."

And certainly, some people absolutely need to burn THEIR END of a "bridge." After a painful breakup where the other person was actually bad for them to be around, it's an important and logical thing to do, to throw away or delete all phone numbers, gifts, emails, online links, and so on. Just no need to go over to that person's house and key their car, or anything like that.

So maybe, if you think you do need to burn a bridge, make sure just to torch the end you can fix any time you want to.

It's been said before, but bears repeating. People haven't really changed, and the patterns of love haven't really changed overall.

What does seem to happen to everyone (who isn't born rich, or who get rich very early and easily), is that when we are young, all it takes is basic attraction, and a little bit of fun, to fall in love. All the romantic ideas about "making it work," and "love makes everything possible" seem to make sense, because no one really knows enough about the trials and travails of real life yet.

After we get run through the Realty Meat Grinder, most people start to make extra stipulations. Yeah, attraction is a given, we don't focus on that as something to talk about anymore, not because it ISN'T important, but because we wont even start to talk about anything else if that isn't there already.

I know at my age, that sexual compatibility is MUCH more important to figure out, not because I'm more sexual than I was as a kid, but because now I know (from experience) how tricky it is to find functional compatibility.

I'm glad for the farmer's sake that Trump decided to get relief for SOME of them, from the fall out from the tariff battles. I haven't seen a clear report yet from ANY mass media site, that clearly explains how something called the Commodity CREDIT Corporation is going to flat out GIVE money to people, but my complaint there is with the typical empty-headedness of pretty much all journalists (regardless of bias).

Anyway.

This particular mess is just a small part of the very big, and far more complicated system of interacting financial elements, which is vaguely referred to as a national and or international economic system. The entirety of it all is such, that the only thing anyone can be accurately sure of, is that changes made to any part of it WILL have effects across the entirety of it all, AND, any overall positive or negative judgment that can be made about those changes, will take a VERY long time to be clear.

In the short term, a tariff battle is very disruptive, and causes problems throughout each nations' economies, often in ways that aren't immediately apparent, because very few people are aware of just how interlocked all of our industries are. In the long term, even if Trump's supposed goals are achieved (the end of tariffs on both sides), disruptions wont STOP, they will just be shifted elsewhere.

The reason why many people are opposed to all government supports to industries (including tariffs and import taxes and fees and so on), is because businesses are much easier to manage, regardless of costs, when those costs are STABLE. The thing is, though, that some government supports are specifically put in place to CREATE stability, and taking them ALL away, will actually make the overall prices of goods and services go up, because the businesses will have to charge enough extra all the time, to make themselves able to weather fluctuating costs.

I frankly don't know whether Trump's approach is going to work as planned or not. If it does, I'll be applauding along with most other people. If it doesn't, I'll be suffering along with everyone else. The only thing I'm sure of so far, is that whatever happens is NOT going to be all good or all bad.

You can't understand it, wont research why, and so you post an insult.

Doesn't advance the discussion.

Sorry if I misinterpreted. I keyed in on the phrases "Go in and permanently remove the oppression," and "Yes, warmongers and cartels would die. Oppressive regimes would be toppled and a lot of people would have to be jailed or eliminated." That read like invasion to me. I sure don't know how to do those things without invading.

How exactly, mechanically, would the US and Canada accomplish this help, that's different from what we've been doing for decades?

Okay. Well, although there have been international invasions and government decapitations and imperial expansions such as you are advocating, which have happened repeatedly over the thousands of years humans have been around, there has never been an occasion where the strategy of "fixing" another country by invading it, ever actually worked.

And although more thorough enforcement of existing laws against employing illegals might help, you wont find any support for it (past lip service) from either of the largest American political parties. The Republicans used to oppose any attempt to require national identity documentation, and though they've reversed course on that over the years, they are still adamantly opposed to spending the amount of money needed to actually enforce even the existing laws against employing illegals. No one supported Trump's campaign proposal to expand INS or the justice system enough to deal with existing cases, and neither party has supported investigation and prosecution of employers.

If your goal is to make it less desirable to come to the US illegally, there are other options you could consider. Such as,put an end to allowing American companies to hire foreign workers at below living wages, even while they are still in their home countries; to prevent foreign companies from selling in the US market, if their national governments allow either slave labor, or oppression of the working classes.

You could also support the opposite of that, which has been proposed by a subset of the Republicans: reverse all American laws requiring safe working environments, end all anti-pollution controls, eliminate all worker rights entirely, and allow American companies to behave as badly and as corruptly as foreign companies do, so that the US wont be attractive any more.

But invasion and "repair" of foreign countries? It never works.

Although you want to believe you've overturned everything I said, for the most part, you simply ignored it, and in some cases, supported it while adding personal insults.

For example, "Two different things, Igor." Of COURSE they were two different things, which is why I set them apart as independent, single sentence paragraphs. Please pause in your biased attacks, long enough to read what I actually say, and stick to that.

Your pretense that nothing was done wrong by businesses during Republican administrations is abject nonsense. Much of what I described took place during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

I didn't at any time say that ONLY Republicans do things wrong, either.

And going back to your rather rude repetition that the bad behaviors I described are not "capitalism" is nonsense entirely. Unless you can prove that capitalism was declared at an end repeatedly, and was openly replaced by "mercantilism" or "cronyism," your claim that my points are invalid, is without merit.

And by the way, mercantilism and cronyism are subsets of capitalism, not alternatives to it. They are known dangers of UNREGULATED capitalism, as many other abusive behaviors are.

And by the way, you failed to read many other things I wrote, including that it is FALSE to say that some of the turn-of-the-previous-century very rich people, accomplished what they did "on their own." No one does that. They all depended on Government enforcement of property rights, ownership of patents, and most important, the ability to ignore worker concerns if they wished to.

To be sure, there have been employers over the centuries who did treat their employees well, and I never even HINTED otherwise, though you appear to be certain I did so explicitly.

Please go back and read what I ACTUALLY said, and respond accurately.

Good points from Tom4Uhere, as usual.

Something I want to point out, is that a fair amount of the turbulence and ire of such arguments, is due to the fact that people are fiercely talking about completely different things, without realizing it.

Our thread hosts opening post itself shows this. He admits that there are seeming contradictions in various TEXTS, while insisting that they are invalid as complaints against his FAITH. His logic is correct, as far as he goes with it. From within ANY faith, the challenge to followers and believers is not to explain to non-believers, why the texts don't make sense to those non-believers. It is to find guidance within their texts which they can follow consistently themselves.

The point of view of both non-believers who are not hostile to the religion, and of believers who approach the texts from a purely scholarly, historical side, can lead to understanding of why the texts DO say what they do, the way that they do, in the context of the times they were written down BY PEOPLE.

There are differences as well, amongst the people who are pointing out textual inconsistencies, as to why they are doing so. In the case of pure historians, for example, the goal isn't to make complaints against the writings, or against the authors or scribes of the various texts, it is instead to UNDERSTAND those people more thoroughly. Their investigation doesn't care whether the texts show contradictions as such, rather they seek to know how the times they were written in, are more accurately revealed by the seeming contradictions.

This is the most important response here. It's what I learned over the too many years I've been around as well.

Something else I would add to this, is that it isn't possible to GENUINELY forgive someone or something that happened, so long as you don't understand how it could have been done by a rational and caring person.

One more thing: not all forgiveness is equal. Sometimes I can forgive someone completely and want them in my life again, but if the offense is bad enough, the most I can do is see an end to my anger at them. And in the worst cases, all I can come to, is to rearrange my own life, so that I am no longer vulnerable to what they did, and to forgive myself, for having allowed them to damage me as they did.

Easttowest72 mentioned that many people don't know the history of the US and the world well enough, and I want to double down on that.

I've found that it's incredibly rare to find people who have even a relatively basic and accurate understanding of the past, including both the distant past, and the recent past.

Examples include...

that the reason for establishing a public education system was NOT because people wanted to share the high cost of education. Actually, the cost sharing had nothing to do with it. It was the overall benefit to the entirety of the society which drove it, including that the entire nation was made more prosperous, and far more militarily secure and philosophically united because of it.

that people who get rich, don't always do so for the ideal reasons that they are supposed to use to get rich. When someone comes up with a better and cheaper product to compete their way to riches, that's the ideal that most people like to expect has happened. But throughout our history, many people who became rich, especially when they did so in large numbers and very rapidly, it was because the system was rigged in their favor, and too often, not because they produced any REAL wealth at all. Our own most recent near financial collapse, was due to lots of FAKE wealth being created. And during the so-called Golden Age of early industrialism in the US, although some millionaires did things right, many more got to where they did by using the Federal and State government military power to force laborers to accept low pay and poor working conditions.

Then as now, the problem of great wealth disparity wasn't the FACT of it. There's nothing inherently damaging to a society in having very very rich people around. The problem then as now, was HOW the wealth disparity came about, and was maintained.

Riches acquired by buying a company, then breaking it up and selling off the pieces, lowering employee pay and benefits, and/or eliminating safety procedures, doesn't create any real wealth at all. But it has been done many times.

Riches acquired by arranging high pay for upper officers and investors, while running the company into the ground through mismanagement doesn't create any real wealth either.

Buying bad loans and selling them as high quality loans actually destroys real wealth, and was the primary cause of the last downturn.

And of course, riches gained by driving down worker pay, destroys real wealth too.

Please go back and read what I ACTUALLY wrote, and respond to that, instead of making up something else, and then insulting me for what you IMAGINED.

I did not say that no jobs have been "created."

I'm not the one watching and believing "fake news."

So far, many more jobs have LEFT the country, and none have "returned."

None.

As for treason...I am cautious about using such extreme labels, since I have seen people bandy them about carelessly throughout my lifetime. I remember in particular, back in the 1970's, that some loud voices on the right, demanded that anyone who protested against American involvement in Vietnam's civil war, be formally declared a traitor, on the grounds that the (unofficial) enemies of the US, derived "comfort" from the protests occurring at all.

I haven't decided yet whether Trump's obvious total incompetence and greed-based willingness to delude himself about the intentions and actions of Putin and other national leaders, is actual treason or not. His actions are certainly serving to weaken the United States everywhere in the world today, so he is having the same negative effects that a traitor would have, but since I am still convinced that since he doesn't realize how deadly wrong he is, that calling him a traitor might not be accurate.

All I can say is, having ACTUALLY studied history, instead of delving into it piecemeal as you folks are doing, is that this recent fad by the right
to delude themselves into pretending to believe that Hitler was a left wing radical, is downright pitiful.

You know, you DO have the option to declare that you ALSO find Hitler and the Nazis disgusting. No need to pretend that they were leftists, just because some few people who you think of as leftist, say that you are similar to the Nazis.

Perry Mason!

Especially the courtroom objections, like "Assumes facts not in evidence."

The point is, there is nothing in it saying that the Federal Government CAN purchase another half country.

There's nothing it it which says "the federal government can build highways through the states."

Those and MANY other things were only possible because various people decided to INTERPRET various statements and clauses as either permitting something not stated, or as implying that it may be done.

Most of those who want a strict word for word reading of the Constitution don't realize this, and assume that whatever has been done or is being done which they LIKE, will continue to be done as it is, even though they completely destroy the legal ability of the government to do it, by demanding the literal readings.