When you include “off balance sheet” debts, which essentially are the “present value of future obligations” (mainly Social Security and Medicare, but also military and other federal employee pensions) , the US national debt is closer to 86 trillion.
All other entities, individual or corporate, are required to include “present value of future obligations” in their balance sheets, but governments are not.
It is sometimes said that the British and American people are still today, in the twenty-first century, indecently obsessed with the Second World War. The reason is not far to seek. We know that here was something which our parents and grandparents did well, in a noble cause …
— Thus Max Hastings
There are many excellent reasons for going after Snowden, but Voltaire’s isn’t one of them.
And I find it astonishing that any American leader would mistake Voltaire’s commentary on l’affaire Byng for a “how-to.” (more…)
The title is part of comments I’ve made over the past few years in regards to same-sex marriage, and how legalization of SSM is tantamount to society’s approval of homosexual sex acts.
(I fully support the prohets’ calls to respect all people while at the same time taking a stand against sexual activity outside the bounds of matrimony between a man and a woman.)
This postcard at PostSecret.com illustrates predictions I’ve made concerning young people experimenting with homosexual acts. Removing societal barriers, “stigmatization” if you will, results in more of the thing that was previously stigmatized. (more…)
Scott Adams riffs on one of Adam’s themes.
Say it ain’t so, WWE.
Concerns regarding brutality by the Henderson Police Department have been raised before on this website. Now a resident says his Third Amendment rights were violated. (link)
… to impose the cultural and behavioral preferences of the upper middle class on the poor.
Thus Walter Russell Mead. (more…)
