Off Topic; The downfall of the US.

Wrong. They like it a *lot*. It relieves them of a lot of headaches and levels the playing field.

Nope, it's called "shrug your responsibilities" and "his mommy lets him stay up until...".

The percentage of GDP taken up by the US governemnt has risen - not all that dramatically - in the last couple if years, after being flat- ish from the mid-1980's. The fact that the GDP actually fell by a couple of percentage points from 2008 to 2009 and it would have been difficult (not to mention extremely stupid) to cut governemnt expenditure in the same proportion in 2009.

Ironically, "doubleplus untrue" is actually Orwellian NewSpeak from the book "1984" and it is noticeable that James Arthur shows all the signs of having had his brain washed in some right-wing re-education camp. Cutting spending does cost jobs - admittedly James Arthur thinks that the government revenue that financed the spending represents even more lost jobs, ignoring the fact that this particular chink of spending is being financed by borrowing money that everybody is too nervous to invest in creating new jobs - so that claim isn't untrue.

That the proposed spending cuts are "divisive" is also true - the Democrats don't agree with them so there is an obvious division of opinion in the legislature, and public opinion seems to be similarly divided along part lines.

As for the "illogic (false choices, etc)" James Arthur will have to identify them for me in detail - his thinking is sufficiently bizarre that it s difficult to predict what he will find to be "illogical" or a "false choice". He may think that it is illogical of Obama not to go along with the Republican plan, on the basis that James Arthur thinks that the Republicans are always right - extremely right - but most of us would recognise that a Democratic president is not expected to see things that way.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

:)

Doesn't help much. A nearby store does that and post pictures of shoplifters who usually don't come back. But the affected families sue the store for defamation and cause all kinds of trouble. It isn't worth the expense to fight the troublemakers. Better to move out of town and let the taggers and shoplifters own the place.

-Bill

You may think so, but you can't think straight at the best of times.

And who is this "lord and master" to whom you think I kowtow? I certainly can't identify anybody who tells me what to do with any strong expectation of being obeyed - give or take the occasional traffic cop.

Since you don't have clue about the society you are living in, your "free will" is merely a device that lets you move from one blunder to another. If there was a "nanny state" around silly enough to accept responsbility for you, it would probably look after you better than you can look after yourself, but even nanny states have devices for abjuring responsibility for the totally hopeless.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen