President Donald Trump's Final Days...

[Arturo2nd]

Originally Posted by ShutUpLutz!

I don't know kind of sad to realize that my high school is situated in one of the richest and most liberal zip codes/counties/areas of the entire country and so many of my classmates turned out to be so conservative.

I really don't get it.

There is your answer right there. Recent studies have shown that country club punks who grow up with every advantage and privilege believe themselves to be "self-made men" who acquired their wealth through their acumen and hard work. Furthermore, they believe that liberals wish to confiscate their wealth and give it to drug addled people of color too lazy to achieve anything on their own.

Perhaps, I am more aware of this as a working class kid who won a scholarship to small private college by dint of a lot of hard work and being able to read at a 12th grade level by grade 8. Four years coexisting with the scions of wealth and privilege has me refusing to vote for a Republican some 50 years later. As far as I am concerned they all either come from inherited wealth or are whores to it. I have rarely seen a Republican put the well being of the nation or sound fiscal policy above making sure that the wealthy can claim an outsize chunk of the national income.

[Roubignol]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

One more time, the predictions that we are "near" peak oil goes back a century and more.

So... why can we still find these predictions (2030 peak oil) on the EIA website?
Are their webmasters so lazy to have not deleted these preoccupying informations?
Why an employee of the EIA wrote a note about 2030 peak oil a decade ago (not a century) and the pdf is still there on their website?

Apart is you are a member of the EIA or a boss of an oil company, I'm sorry, but I prefer to trust them than to trust your speech here.

I know... that's not the topic, but I can't let members here preaching what is considered by specialists to be sophisms.

[laberbacke]

[QUOTE=ShutUpLutz!;4643441]So it turns out that the valedictorian of my high school class, a guy named Gordon Hartogensis, who lived less than 5 minutes away from me growing up has been nominated by the Trump administration to be Director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which essentially helps to manage certain private pension plans and has been doing a not so great job at it, so naturally rather than get someone who actually has experience with pensions the person the pick's only experience with this kind of thing is being the trustee of the Hartogensis Family Trust.

Oh yeah, he also just happens to be Mitch McConnell's brother in law.


I believe sometimes they just go with the guy whose name is most suitable to be a villain in a Star Wars movie.

Reince Priebus. Gordon Hartogensis. Seriously?

Originally Posted by ShutUpLutz!

What makes it even worse is that other members of my high school class have been going on and on about how awesome this is and great it is that Trump picked someone from
Actually, looking back at what was in my yearbooks Ingoand what happened to me when I wrote an oped for the school paper, of course i can believe it, it's just, I don't know kind of sad to realize that my high school is situated in one of the richest and most liberal zip codes/counties/areas of the entire country and so many of my classmates turned out to be so conservative.

I really don't get it.

What Brian said. It's pretty well established in behavioral sciences that there's a strong correlation between wealth and a lack of empathy for others - that is especially true for people with inherited wealth, who never knew another life. You and I and 99% of the people on this planet live a life in communities - we rely on others in a multitude of different ways. People like Trump never need to rely on anyone, because they can just buy their way out of every problem. Other people, just like his assets, are a mere commodity to Trump and other billionaires - to be bought and sold as it serves them.


Almost every extremely wealthy person in the world believes they got to their station through ingenuity and hard work - even though more than two thirds of these so called ultra high net worth individuals inherited their fortune. And everyone who isn't as rich must be lazy or stupid. Remember how absolutely furious they got at Barack Obama when he correctly stated that "you didn't build that" [on your own]? Try to build a successful, legal business in an anomic hellhole like Somalia, without all the public infrastructure and institutions that need a lot of tax revenue to function properly. But they don't want to pay their fair share to maintain these instutitions that made their wealth possible in the first place, that enabled their grandparents to get rich and hand down the fortune to them.



These people believe themselves to be the masters of the universe, and why shouldn't they? It's like a columnist of the Washington Post stated about Trump: He's the freest man alive.


With that kind of life-long freedom from consequence, it's the exception, not the norm, for a person to turn out a genuinely kind, empathetic and decent human being.



Your classmates, to sum it up in a nutshell, aren't outliers, but par for the course.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by laberbacke

It's pretty well established in behavioral sciences that there's a strong correlation between wealth and a lack of empathy for others - that is especially true for people with inherited wealth, who never knew another life.

I am skeptical of that sort of statement. Trump's greed and selfishness is his own thing.

The wealthiest man in the world, Bill Gates, will give the bulk of his fortune to his foundation -- which has written in stone "every life has equal value"

Among folks with inherited wealth, the Rockefellers are the titans of yesteryear. They certainly lived very comfortably, but its hard to suggest that they didn't use their fortunes and position to improve the lives of people with less.

My suspicion is that Trump is not in fact particularly wealthy; his money hunger looks more like a heavily indebted grifter than it does someone who knows "I have enough".

[BustyWomenLovr]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

My suspicion is that Trump is not in fact particularly wealthy; his money hunger looks more like a heavily indebted grifter than it does someone who knows "I have enough".

There's the thing - He will tell you on and on how smart he is, how rich he is, and how he will have "the best people" Well one thing he won't show is how rich, and as I totally do not believe a thing he has said about anything else, I don't believe he is all that rich (certainly far richer than me!). I do believe is is in deep debt to others outside the USA as no US banks would touch him after his multiple bankruptcies. Which is why he sucks up to them putting himself before the Nation. F-ing Traitor.

[ShutUpLutz!]

Okay, I have to clarify some things. Yes I and my friend Gordo did live and attend school in one of the richest zip codes/counties/areas in the US.

But neither of us lived in mansions, in fact you had to drive a couple miles into Potomac before you saw any of those. Our neighborhood was middle/upper middle class for the time period, late 1970's-80's. There was one person in our entire development who had a 'luxury car,' a Porsche 944. And our high school wasn't like Beverly Hills High School, there weren't any students rolling up driving Porsches, BMW's, Ferrari's. There was one guy who drove a Jaguar and it wasn't Gordon, but a guy named Neils who played was a really good bass player and bought the Jag used. Kept on breaking down in the parking lot.

As for Gordon after graduation he attended Stanford and got together with some classmates and formed a software company because of course he did, then sold it off for some bucks some years later. He wasn't a stuffy dick in high school, honestly I never really noticed him simply because he was in AP classes and I....was not. By the time we graduated, in terms of class rank Gordon was 1 out of 537, while i was 417 out of 537.

But I did get into an actual fully accredited college!!

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

I am skeptical of that sort of statement. Trump's greed and selfishness is his own thing.

The wealthiest man in the world, Bill Gates, will give the bulk of his fortune to his foundation -- which has written in stone "every life has equal value"

Among folks with inherited wealth, the Rockefellers are the titans of yesteryear. They certainly lived very comfortably, but its hard to suggest that they didn't use their fortunes and position to improve the lives of people with less.

My suspicion is that Trump is not in fact particularly wealthy; his money hunger looks more like a heavily indebted grifter than it does someone who knows "I have enough".

The original Lord Rothschild, though the first Baron, was by no means the first holder of the UK branch family's wealth. NM Rothschild and Sons had been a noted merchant bank for a long time before the first Baron was born. The Rothschild family were also already noted philanthropists. The first Baron supported numerous hospitals all over the UK, these being the days when ordinary working people had the right to die, screaming in agony, if they couldn't pay for a doctor. Thanks to Lord Rothschild, many people lived who would otherwise have died of treatable injuries and diseases, and others got well who would otherwise have been crippled for life. Lord Rothschild almost certainly wasn't a nice man, but he had standards and he lived by them.

Mr Trump has no standards at all.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

Thanks to Lord Rothschild, many people lived who would otherwise have died of treatable injuries and diseases, and others got well who would otherwise have been crippled for life. Lord Rothschild almost certainly wasn't a nice man, but he had standards and he lived by them.

And those are values that decent people have. Britain famously had the Quakers and "Birmingham Capitalism" as an example of "what you do if you're well off".

I am with the social democrats in that I don't think we should have to beg others -- no matter how generous they might be-- for things like healthcare. One of the most humiliating signs of America's shabbiness is the handmade signs you'll see in American stores, pleading for money for some family member's medical treatment.

So I appreciate the charity, but at this point, things like healthcare should simply be financed as public utilities-- people once had to subscribe to fire departments, we abandoned that model a century ago. Here's a real letter to a prospective heart transplant patient from (appropriately enough) a clinic in Michigan named for the Devos family (billionaires from Amway, a better scam than Trump's): it suggests a "fundraising effort" . . . just monstrous.

Originally Posted by scoundrel

Mr Trump has no standards at all.

. . . and likely no ready credit.

One of the things I notice about him is that he's never bought anything with that wealth that reflects even the slightest interest in anything besides his gilded bathroom. Most rich people have some passion -- art, old books, acres of countryside.

Trump seems to have none. There is no hint that he's ever read a book. Not a reference to a work of music. The only painting of note associated with him is a garish cartoon that a fan made, showing him playing poker with other Republican Presidents, who gaze at him admiringly . . . its a singularly repellent work of "art", the sort of thing you used to see for Mao or Stalin.



[I am particularly repulsed by the suggestion of Eisenhower -- a man of real quality who had well documented contempt for men like Trump-- cheerfully rubbing shoulders with him]

[Mal Hombre]

As if Lincoln would want to be in the same room let alone the same table..Mind You it's not often that Nixon isn't the most reprehensible guy in the room..

[laberbacke]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

I am skeptical of that sort of statement. Trump's greed and selfishness is his own thing.

The wealthiest man in the world, Bill Gates, will give the bulk of his fortune to his foundation -- which has written in stone "every life has equal value"

Among folks with inherited wealth, the Rockefellers are the titans of yesteryear. They certainly lived very comfortably, but its hard to suggest that they didn't use their fortunes and position to improve the lives of people with less.

My suspicion is that Trump is not in fact particularly wealthy; his money hunger looks more like a heavily indebted grifter than it does someone who knows "I have enough".

I expected someone to make the "but Bill Gates" argument. Please take into account that I am talking about statistical averages here - obviously not every extremely wealthy person is a ruthless robber baron - but the number of people with psychopathic traits among them is far higher than among the rest of the population.

Originally Posted by deepsepia

. . . and likely no ready credit.

One of the things I notice about him is that he's never bought anything with that wealth that reflects even the slightest interest in anything besides his gilded bathroom. Most rich people have some passion -- art, old books, acres of countryside.

Trump seems to have none. There is no hint that he's ever read a book. Not a reference to a work of music. The only painting of note associated with him is a garish cartoon that a fan made, showing him playing poker with other Republican Presidents, who gaze at him admiringly . . . its a singularly repellent work of "art", the sort of thing you used to see for Mao or Stalin.



[I am particularly repulsed by the suggestion of Eisenhower -- a man of real quality who had well documented contempt for men like Trump-- cheerfully rubbing shoulders with him]

Eisenhower was also the last Republican presidential candidate to win an election and become President fair and square (1956) without resorting to high treason (Nixon, 1968, Reagan & Bush Sr. 1980, Trump 2016), election fraud (Bush Jr. 2000, Bush Jr. 2004, Trump 2016), related crimes (Nixon, 1972) or being an accessory to those crimes (Ford, 1974).



Like I've said before: The Republican Party has been a cancer on the American body politic long before Trump came around. Either it is destroyed and dismantled, or it will destroy the Republic. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but eventually.



The NSDAP was banned here in Germany following its failed coup d'etat in 1923. But in 1929, that decision was reversed, and the formerly broke, desolate and banned party grew quickly, thanks to some major funding by German industrialists who wanted to get rid of the Republic and return to the old days of imperial glory. Just four years later, they were strong enough to seize power and the rest is history. But imagine the ban had stayed in effect - no layman would know the name Adolf Hitler and there'd be twice as many Jews alive today.


Letting these treasonous monsters skate again and again and again will come back to haunt the United States - and, given its military might, the whole world.