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Reports of protests are overblown. A few incidents around the country, but nothing major.

5 (45.5%)

A few major incidents in capitals, but nothing much in DC.

5 (45.5%)

A major incident in DC, but nothing much around the country.

0 (0%)

More than 10 capitals have major upheavals, but nothing much in DC.

0 (0%)

A major incident in DC plus more than 10 capitals with significant upheavals.

1 (9.1%)

More than half the capitals around the country have problems with protesters, but DC is quiet.

0 (0%)

DC has major problems, while more than half the capitals around the country also have considerable trouble with protesters.

0 (0%)

Huge disruption to the day.

0 (0%)

Total Members Voted: 9

Voting closed: January 19, 2021, 10:49:21 PM

[josh]

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/07/11/visualizing-a-2o-c-increase-in-temperature-in-major-world-cities-melting-of-thwaites-glacier-in-antarctica-if-this-is-a-hoax-its-a-damn-good-one/?fbclid=IwAR3FD8iySAE1TqOnxjdsaXMgQbVSjLJrmOEG-IIBqytXaAYSslGNw_Fl9l0

A bit more on what's happening on Antarctica.

[LarryBnDC]

But the stock market is booming!


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-farmers-lending-insight/wall-street-banks-bailing-on-troubled-u-s-farm-sector-idUSKCN1U618F

A redline by any name...

I feel badly for these folks, but they hitched their wagons to a bullshit artist...

[barton]

Work on the Star Wars program resulted in the invention of laser eye surgery.

Nonsense.   LASIK grew out of peacetime research on the laser at Bell Labs et al.   Feel free to provide evidence for your claims.   

[barton]

As for SDI it effectively ended the Soviet Union.

Nonsense.   Feel free to provide evidence for your absurd talking point.   

[REDSTATEWARD]

As for SDI it effectively ended the Soviet Union.

Nonsense.   Feel free to provide evidence for your absurd talking point.

Who is the current President of the Soviet Union?

[barton]

The fact that it ended is not in dispute.   Your assertion that SDI caused the dissolution of the CCCP is what is being challenged.   

I'll wait.

[luee]

Tony.

I wanted Marco Rubio for President of the USA, and I think that Marco would have been much better than Trump,     

Our cats have gagged up hairballs that would have been much better than Trump.

Reagan you love?   

Reagan slashed federal money to schools by a billion dollars. 

As a president who said "trees cause more pollution than automobiles do," Reagan issued leases for oil, gas, and coal development on tens of millions of acres of national lands. Reagan's appointee to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Anne Gorsuch, tried to gut the 1972 Clean Water Act, cut EPA funding by 25%, and mismanaged a $1.6 billion program to clean up hazardous waste dumps.

He spent 33 billion dollars on SDI, the "Star Wars" ray gun program that never worked.

Reagan believed that widespread freeloading plagued welfare and social programs. As Reagan slashed spending in his first term on programs such as food stamps and subsidized housing, the poverty rate climbed from 12% to 15% and unemployment rose from 7% to 11%.

Reagan broke his own vows not to make deals with terrorists or states that aided them. In the "Iran-Contra" scandal, Reagan's administration bypassed congressional restrictions on aiding Nicaragua's Contra guerilla fighters, in part by diverting money to them from the sale of missiles to Iran.

Reagan pledged during his 1980 campaign for president to balance the federal budget, but never submitted a balanced budget in his eight years in office. In 1981, the deficit was $79 billion and, in 1986, at the peak of his deficit spending, it stood at $221 billion. The federal debt was $994 billion when he took office in 1981 and grew to $2.9 trillion when his second term ended in 1989.

Yeah, "great" president!

He taxed unemployment benefits!

[REDSTATEWARD]

The fact that it ended is not in dispute.   Your assertion that SDI caused the dissolution of the CCCP is what is being challenged.   

I'll wait.

That train left the station 30 years ago. 

[Hairy Lime]

As for SDI it effectively ended the Soviet Union.

Nonsense.   Feel free to provide evidence for your absurd talking point.

Who is the current President of the Soviet Union?

Non sequitur! 15 - love.

[Hairy Lime]

The fact that it ended is not in dispute.   Your assertion that SDI caused the dissolution of the CCCP is what is being challenged.   

I'll wait.

That train left the station 30 years ago.

So you admit there is no evidence to support the causal relationship between SDI and the collapse.of the Soviet Empire but lack the intellectual bravery to admit it. Behave as expected.

[REDSTATEWARD]

The fact that it ended is not in dispute.   Your assertion that SDI caused the dissolution of the CCCP is what is being challenged.   

I'll wait.

That train left the station 30 years ago.

So you admit there is no evidence to support the causal relationship between SDI and the collapse.of the Soviet Empire but lack the intellectual bravery to admit it. Behave as expected.

LOL
SDI was a lynchpin in Reagan’s Defense buildup.  An important factor in the Reagan Doctrine—that America would come to the aid of freedom fighters to throw off Soviet tyranny. It ended the Brezhnev Doctrine, which claimed that all socialist countries would fight any effort to introduce capitalism on their turf.
Gorbachev with all of his attempts to save the Soviet Union finally understood  the obvious:  the Soviet Union was so far behind in the Arms Race it had no choice but to just go away.

[LarryBnDC]

The fact that it ended is not in dispute.   Your assertion that SDI caused the dissolution of the CCCP is what is being challenged.   

I'll wait.

That train left the station 30 years ago.

So you admit there is no evidence to support the causal relationship between SDI and the collapse.of the Soviet Empire but lack the intellectual bravery to admit it. Behave as expected.

LOL
SDI was a lynchpin in Reagan’s Defense buildup.  An important factor in the Reagan Doctrine—that America would come to the aid of freedom fighters to throw off Soviet tyranny. It ended the Brezhnev Doctrine, which claimed that all socialist countries would fight any effort to introduce capitalism on their turf.
Gorbachev with all of his attempts to save the Soviet Union finally understood  the obvious:  the Soviet Union was so far behind in the Arms Race it had no choice but to just go away.

The Soviets committed suicide in Afghanistan. They were done. SDI was seen as Reagan gearing up a first strike weapon and Soviet hawks wanted to respond in kind but those dumb fucks had blown up their globsl strategy and leverage in Afghanistan so they could nothing else but fold.

Fast forward thirty years and the President of Russia in dealing with USA has zero economic power, zero military power and yet is winning the ideological battle because his best asset for defeating the USA is the President of The USA.

Slowly but almost surely Putin is becoming the President ofva reconstituted Soviet Union.

[barton]

The fact that it ended is not in dispute.   Your assertion that SDI caused the dissolution of the CCCP is what is being challenged.   

I'll wait.

That train left the station 30 years ago.

So you admit there is no evidence to support the causal relationship between SDI and the collapse.of the Soviet Empire but lack the intellectual bravery to admit it. Behave as expected.

LOL
SDI was a lynchpin in Reagan’s Defense buildup.  An important factor in the Reagan Doctrine—that America would come to the aid of freedom fighters to throw off Soviet tyranny. It ended the Brezhnev Doctrine, which claimed that all socialist countries would fight any effort to introduce capitalism on their turf.
Gorbachev with all of his attempts to save the Soviet Union finally understood  the obvious:  the Soviet Union was so far behind in the Arms Race it had no choice but to just go away.

You can keep saying the same thing, but you still haven't really shown how SDI was a linchpin or THE linchpin (not sure what a "lynchpin" is, unless it's a sharp object you find in some salad dressings).  The collapse was far more about economics than intimidation by Ray Guns (pun intended).  Here's part of an essay by a historian, based on CIA and DOS documents from that period:

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Communist Party elite rapidly gained wealth and power while millions of average Soviet citizens faced starvation. The Soviet Union’s push to industrialize at any cost resulted in frequent shortages of food and consumer goods. Bread lines were common throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Soviet citizens often did not have access to basic needs, such as clothing or shoes.

The divide between the extreme wealth of the Politburo and the poverty of Soviet citizens created a backlash from younger people who refused to adopt Communist Party ideology as their parents had.

The USSR also faced foreign attacks on the Soviet economy. In the 1980s, the United States under President Ronald Reagan isolated the Soviet economy from the rest of the world and helped drive oil prices to their lowest levels in decades. When the Soviet Union’s oil and gas revenue dropped dramatically, the USSR began to lose its hold on Eastern Europe.

Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s reforms were slow to bear fruit and did more to hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union than to help it. A loosening of controls over the Soviet people emboldened independence movements in the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe.

Political revolution in Poland in 1989 sparked other, mostly peaceful revolutions across Eastern European states and led to the toppling of the Berlin Wall. By the end of 1989, the USSR had come apart at the seams.

An unsuccessful coup by Communist Party hard-liners in August 1991 sealed the Soviet Union’s fate by diminishing Gorbachev’s power and propelling democratic forces, led by Boris Yeltsin, to the forefront of Russian politics.

Source:

https://www.history.com/topics/russia/history-of-the-soviet-union#section_8

[barton]

Also eagerly await your explanation of how Reagan knew what he was doing blowing giant holes in the budget, one of the points in my OP on the topic.  Let me repost it for you:

Reagan pledged during his 1980 campaign for president to balance the federal budget, but never submitted a balanced budget in his eight years in office. In 1981, the deficit was $79 billion and, in 1986, at the peak of his deficit spending, it stood at $221 billion. The federal debt was $994 billion when he took office in 1981 and grew to $2.9 trillion when his second term ended in 1989.

Golly but that sounds familiar!  Maybe history does rhyme, like ol' Sam Clemens said.

[facilitatorn]

http://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/congratulations-again-mr-president-trump-and-the-co-opting-of-the-gop

Can’t trust the bootlicks to get economics or history right. They’re nothing more than puppets to a puppet.