leftist: Conquest is an illegitimate form of acquisition.
non-leftist: OK…
leftist: Well, up until the modern era, conquest was the main basis for acquisition.
non-leftist: again, OK…..
leftist: don’t you get it? When you buy something you are buying land or other goods derived from the land which were, at some point not to many decades ago, acquired through the illegitimate form of conquest. Someone took it by force!
non-leftist: What, exactly, are you driving at?
leftist: If it was originally obtained through conquest then passing that on to someone else is like selling stolen property! you might as well buy a car from a car thief!
non-leftist: But virtually everything on the planet, at one point or another was taken from someone else by force and then passed on from that point, by inheritance or sale, to someone else. By your form of reason there is no one who can claim ownership of anything, unless they grew it or made it themselves. Even then they grew it or made it from something that, according to you, they did not legitimately own.
leftist: That’s right. No one can claim ownership of anything at all. It is all a big sham! So hand over that Lexus you bought with your illegitimate money you earned from your ill gotten job you barbaric thief!

I have come to the conclusion that there is a critical mass level on facebook. With too few people whom you have friended you will not tend to spend any time on the site because there is too little to read about and too few people who read your posts. At a certain point, and I don’t know where that is (I think it is different for everyone) you will have the right amount of “friends” and be very free with your posts. Then you reach a certain tipping point. You become “friends” with people on facebook that you really are not friends with. You have people who not only do not share your religious-political-social mores but will be just fine in telling you how you are stupid in your thoughts and opinions on such things. Nothing wrong with that per se, differing viewpoints are good and will either persuade you to change your thoughts or get you to think them through enough to be firm in believing them. but it will reach a point where you will be uncomfortable with the things people say. When this happens you have reached a certain level where you will be forced to do one of two things. You either edit who can see things that you post, or you cease to be as open and honest about what you think and believe. You may not have reached this point and it may be a lot higher for some people than for others, but keep adding people as “friends” and you will. Personally I have been just fine with ignoring several people who have sent me “friend” requests because they are not really my friends but merely people I am ever so faintly acquainted with. But that is just my opinion and I am sure someone will disagree with it and tell me about it.

Tonight I was driving, as usual, but in a very nice rental car and it had something that I absolutely and completely enjoyed. Sirius XM satellite radio. I tuned it in to the 80’s station (channel 8 if you want to know) and I was instantly rewarded with the removal of two decades of bad music from my life (at least while it was on). My mind was transported to a better time. Now some would say ‘The 80’s? that was the time of Blondie with “Mickey” (of course your remember it even if you pretend not to. Come on, and sing along “Oh mickey you’re so fine. You’re so fine you blow my mind. Hey Mickey!”) The time of Cindy Lauper with “Girls just wanna have fun” and Billy Idol’s cover of “White Wedding”‘. And I say YES it was in fact all of those (and they were great no matter what we won’t admit to in public 25 years later) but it was also the time of U2 with “Where the streets have no name” and Robert Palmer’s “Simply irresistible”. Just some absolutely fantastic music! Now unfortunately it was also the time of Tone Loc and “Wild Thing” (which, for some nostalgic reason I couldn’t bring myself to turn off) but no decade is perfect. If you have the means, I highly recommend that you get yourself an XM Satellite Radio and get some Siriusly good music (that would be channel 8). By the way, this isn’t an advertisement post and I am not getting compensated for saying these things. I just really loved it.

I was listening to the farm reports on the radio (yeah, I live in farm country) and they said that China has really upped it’s imports of soybeans from us, and South America is out of them. I have an idea, instead of paying farmers not to farm, why don’t we pay China back the $800B in food? I mean seriously we could simply say to them, “Hey, you can’t get it anywhere else (Europe is also importing more right now than before) and we have lots of it, you’re going to starve without our food so you need to take it in place of the money we owe you.” It’s a win all the way around for us. We are already paying farmers NOT to farm, how about we quit doing that and just use that money to buy the crop from them and then turn around and sell it to the Chinese at a profit? We end up not spending any extra money and we get rid of a lot of debt.

You hear it every day; we, as a country are too far in debt. Our current deficit for this year is already four times higher than it ever was before, which in and of itself is a pretty scary thing when you consider that the last president had doubled our deficit in his last year in office from any time before that (yes this means that we have spent eight times more money that we don’t have this year than we did just two years ago). So we get this wondrous news recently that some of the banks that we gave hundreds of billions of dollars to earlier this year are paying it back. This should be a great thing (and it would be if it were not for the fact that they got that money from the Federal Reserve Bank so they could pay it back to the Treasury. If that sounds like moving money from one pocket to another that would be… because it is) So, despite that, our glorious Leader had a great idea of what to do with all this new found money. He wants to pay down some of that deficit we built up with what he himself called “unsustainable spending” right? Um, no. His thoughts on what to do with all that money we just found by shuffling debt from one agency to another is… I kid you not “spend our way out of this recession”. That is right. Spend even more money that we do not have (but we are pretending we have by changing what we write down in our books). Is anyone in Washington seeing the Chinese grin as they think of how they are going to divide up our country when we collapse and they call in our $800B loan? Is there no one in the press who is willing to confront the games being played and actually report this idiocy? They sure seemed willing a year or two ago.

There is a University of Michigan student who is being charged with assault for punching a Notre Dame fan 90 minutes before the game this year, (see the article) But I am not really thinking that this is a crime, or if it is, then it really should not be.