On a country like Afghanistan, Petraeus and Obama and the rest of the political and military elite simply don’t get it! It’s like an Arab will always be an Arab, and a Viking will always be a Viking. And a dolphin will always be a dolphin, often exhibiting a friendly appearance and seemingly playful attitude while a tiger will always be a tiger and it will eat you alive every time it has a chance! And so is Afghanistan; they will always be Afghanis, and they will always interface with their adversaries no matter how, but at the end of the day as they say, they will not yield on inch on who and what they are, then and now and until hell freezes over. So we might as well kiss our mission over there good bye and cut our losses!
These boneheads who are supposedly our leaders are excruciatingly devoid of all horse sense. Let’s just end our present involvement in Afghanistan right now and pull all the U.S. troops out of there. Let us focus and fortify our efforts instead on preventing terrorist attacks within our own borders and extend that zone to include around a few thousand miles beyond. There is no way even for the great U.S. of A. to nation-rebuild a country like Afghanistan; like they say, just go through their history in the last millennia.
Similarly, there is no way on earth we in the U.S. can avert the impending catastrophic fiscal wipeout due to the skyrocketing health care costs. In a fiscally robust society, full access by everybody to universal medical care would be a prudent policy, but given the current situation of our ongoing dwindling government revenues and rising budget deficits and health insurance premiums going through the roof plus the distressingly worsening, high percentage of fat-obese citizenry that continues to overtax the U.S. medical care system & the U.S. economy, the only way we the people and our government can derail this runaway fiscal-doomsday train is to face the music now and impose radical measures with strict controls on the costs of healthcare. Let us do this—implement a “fat deductible” throughout the country like they have instituted in Alabama with their state employees. They are required to pay a much higher dollar deductible and co-pay to get medical care if an employee exceeds a certain body mass index (BMI) threshold. And on a countrywide basis we need to implement this type of strict control across the board on private insurance as well as on medicare/medicaid. This will serve as a negative reinforcement against the lack of personal responsibility among those who constantly overeat and are abusive to their body and health. Let’s do it on a tough love basis, no exceptions, and if people expire, so be it. The choice before us is quite clear. We’ll be bankrupt and we become extinct as a people or we adhere to and maintain what makes sense fiscally and economically and hope that we can continue to perpetuate. Or we can all continue to pat ourselves on the back and keep on denying our own massively disgusting “fat/chronic disease-certain problems” until we are a second rate nation-power because we simply ran out of resources and thus conquered, and worst, defeated. Certainly we can go on rationalizing that things indeed will improve, but think again! We are no longer in the normally cyclical, periodically predictable, somewhat sustainable twentieth century.
The twentieth century as oppose to post twentieth century. Think of it in these terms. Comparatively it’s like regional versus universal, isolation vs conflagration, the fall of South Vietnam vs the collapse of the Soviet Union, family squabble vs citywide riots, snowmelt vs tsunami; in other words, localized damage and confined effect were pretty much the norm in the past century versus planetary domino effect as the ongoing dominant trend .
This time it is different due to the virtual world connectivity we all share and because of the externalized, seldom understood not to mention uncontrollable, frequent systemic and volatile global factors, compounded by our own stunning naiveté which seems to have no end in sight with our widely publicized infamous avarice as consumers and investors [post 2008 U.S. financial collapse] plus hubris & nonsense on the part of our unlimited supply of inept, career-oriented, polarized politicos. Blame the breakneck speed of universal & instant-gratification/disaster technology, but also consider the so-called QE1 & QE2 that’s been experimented by the U.S. central bank coupled with its ongoing negative cost of lending/borrowing that’s been implemented and hawked for a few years now, and still, the U.S. economy is in no better shape than it was several years ago. And globally, things seemingly are far from better if not predictably deteriotating with its potentially game changing debt crises brewing in the EU. Asian financial markets don’t have much to show for either. Things will not get better, so, what then?
On the languishing unemployment front, when will our political leaders be bold enough to admit that society [the government] in a capitalistic system cannot keep on raising taxes on the wealthy and the powerful because they are also known as investors, job creators and entrepreneurs. You tax them and they won’t spend, and without their spending and expanding there won’t be any hiring. It’s as basic as that! Surely we all understand the place and role of government with respect to the needy [to help...], but by the same token, if we no longer have a viable system because of irresponsible governance, who’s going to help them? And where will we be as a once great nation? But what about social democracy, you ask? …anyone? I didn’t think so. At least not yet… Conversely, it’s a no brainer to just leave alone the ballooning entitlements and just raise taxes to finance this unsustainable welfare system, but what then when, not if, the U.S. eventually becomes insolvent with the jobless rate at fifteen percent plus, which is sooner rather than later, and we as a great society can no longer remedy this sad state of affairs?
Go ahead and laugh… just hope and pray that you will indeed have the last laugh.
Tags: Conflicts, Economy, Health, Politics // Add Comment »
