CabinBoy388 wrote: An Easter egg roll without Jesus or religion. Horror upon horrors! How on earth can we ever celebrate the resurrection of Christ without linking it to a Pagan fairy tale? - Obamacare: "Driving Up Unemployment and Insurance Costs Since 2010™"
Dear Comrade Cabin Boy,
Cue the semi-educated liberal who tries to denigrate Christianity by tying it to paganism without any context at all. As usual, your comments make you sound like you have some sort of a thought disorder. Of course you do, but since you’re an unmedicated liberal, it’s to be expected.
At issue isn’t “How on earth can we ever celebrate the resurrection of Christ without linking it to a Pagan fairy tale,” but rather the exact opposite. That is, to celebrate Easter eggs without including the reason why the Easter egg exists, which is, of course, the celebration of the death and resurrection of Christ.
Only a liberal like you would think it appropriate to have an “Easter” egg hunt while trying to suppress the central idea of Easter.
If you were better educated you would know that eggs were forbidden during Lent. On Easter Sunday, eggs came back to the table.
From the Catholic Encyclopedia:
Because the use of eggs was forbidden during Lent, they were brought to the table on Easter Day, coloured red to symbolize the Easter joy. This custom is found not only in the Latin but also in the Oriental Churches. The symbolic meaning of a new creation of mankind by Jesus risen from the dead was probably an invention of later times. The custom may have its origin in paganism, for a great many pagan customs, celebrating the return of spring, gravitated to Easter. The egg is the emblem of the germinating life of early spring. Easter eggs, the children are told, come from Rome with the bells which on Thursday go to Rome and return Saturday morning. The sponsors in some countries give Easter eggs to their god-children. Coloured eggs are used by children at Easter in a sort of game which consists in testing the strength of the shells (Kraus, Real-Encyklopædie, s.v. Ei). Both coloured and uncoloured eggs are used in some parts of the United States for this game, known as "egg-picking". Another practice is the "egg-rolling" by children on Easter Monday on the lawn of the White House in Washington.
Of course, as it says above, Christians weren’t the first to dye eggs. Dyed eggs go way back in history to antiquity. But to pretend that the Easter egg has its only origins in pagan traditions would be like saying that Gregorian chants solely owe their creation to pagan singing.
That Jesus lived is an accepted historical fact. That Jesus died is also accepted as an historical fact. Easter eggs would not exist were it not for his resurrection. You may deny it, but then you're stuck having to roll "Ostara" eggs at the White House. I'm not saying you won't do it- that is, roll "Ostara eggs"- I'm just saying I'd like to see the White House try it. It would be a nice break from their normal hypocrisy.
Now that you’ve read this far, I’ll let the Belle Jar blog- who totally debunks the “pagan" Easter thing making its way on Facebook- lecture you the rest of the way:
Look, go ahead and debate religion. Go ahead and tell Christians why what they believe is wrong. That’s totally fine and, in fact, I encourage it. A little debate and critical thinking are good for everyone. But do it intelligently. Get to know the Bible, so you actually know what you’re disagreeing with when you form an argument. Brush up on your theology so that you can explain why it’s so wrong. And have some compassion, for Christ’s sake…
Amen.
Addendum: Google is celebrating Easter by posting a picture of Hugo Chavez in its logo. Liberals suck. Myabe the world did end on December 21st and we just don't know it. We live in hell now.
Correction: It's apparently Cesar Chavez, not Hugo. Still, it's Easter.
True Liberal wrote: Maybe the best way to combat the growth of these big banks is to charge them a 10 point penalty that will fund any bank failures. Large banks would be charged this penalty and the smaller banks would not. There would be a disincentive to the too big to fail banks. - Cyprus by Other Means
Dear Comrade Liberal,
That’s what FDIC insurance is supposed to take care of. Banks already pay into an insurance fund to guarantee depositors against bank failure. The problem is that if all the banks- or some of the biggest- went at the same time, there’d not be enough money in the fund to bailout depositors.
With money market funds, there really is no reason for depositors to have cash accounts over $250,000.
The solutions for too big to fail are really pretty simple.
First, we have to get the banks out of the investment business and the investment business out of banks. That’s the way it worked since the Great Depression and while we had bank failures and market crashes, they were contained.
Next, we have to level the playing field and not give big banks an advantage over smaller community banks as far as capitalization. For the last twenty years big banks have been lobbying the federal government to gain a competitive advantage over smaller banks. One of the advantages big banks enjoy now is a legal guarantee that the federal government will bail them out next time they run into trouble. That allows them to raise money more cheaply than smaller banks. That needs to end.
Lastly, we should never, ever allow someone like Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner or Jack Lew –each with deep ties to the financial industry- to be secretary of the treasury.
All of us should be greatly concerned about whether public policy over the last ten years has served the public or a narrow set of people in Washington and on Wall Street.
DG Wrote: Perhaps we can coin a word: ....... It will be a verb, cyprus. We can say the government cyprussed investors of GM stocks and bonds when Government Motors bailed out the UAW at the expense of GM investors. ..... "To cyprus" means for government to confiscate or steal property from individuals. - Cyprus by Other Means
Dear DG,
Once again you are right on.
Another example: “The Patriots got cyprused by the New York Jets in the AFC title game.”
Rgama wrote: Fortunately, in 2010, we elected all those House Republicans that were going to be laser-focused on creating jobs. Oh...wait... - Obamacare: "Driving Up Unemployment and Insurance Costs Since 2010™"
Dear Comrade RG,
Yeah, ‘cause the 435 members of the House have so much to do with creating jobs.
Here’s a tip for your liberal friends. If you want to create jobs:
1) Have Obama sign the order for the Keystone Pipeline.
2) Get the Senate to vote, as the House did, to repeal a) Obamacare; b) MACT Act; c) Dodd-Frank.
3) Get the Senate to pass these House-passed job bills: a) The Pathway to Job Creation through a Simpler, Fairer Tax Code Act of 2012; b) Job Protection and Recession Prevention Act of 2012; c) Regulatory Freeze for Jobs Act of 2012; Congressional Replacement of President Obama''s Energy-Restricting and Job-Limiting Offshore Drilling; National Strategic and Critical Minerals Production Act of 2012; The Domestic Energy and Jobs Act; Regulatory Accountability Act of 2011.
4) Or check out any of the other House generated acts at The Plan for America’s Job Creators.
The GOP’s not perfect, but at least they have done some of the right things.
Tim R wrote: Europeans have paved the way for greedy governments to get their depositors money. but in Cyprus' case, it was NOT the Cyprus Government's idea to raid deposits. When Cypriots went to Brussels to negotiate, the Eurogroup and the IMF put a gun on their heads and forced them to raid their people's account, threatening that they would cut ELA (emergency liquidity assistance) to the Cypriot bank's the NEXT day (that would mean total chaos). It's very dangerous politics and they OPENED pandoras box. - Paul Krugman Wins Nobel: Best Supporting Liberal Playing Economist in Cyprus
Dear Tim,
That’s what’s so scary about this situation.
The guys who put together the Cyprus deal look pretty much like the guys running things on this side of the Atlantic.
JasonQ wrote: Mr. Ransom writes: "raiding uninsured depositor accounts to meet the capital requirements of any bank, without the consent of the account holders, well, that’s theft." Theft which he blames on the government. However, the whole reason the bank is failing is that it lent out or invested far more than it could afford to lose. In effect, the bank had already stolen from its depositors - or at least behaved wrecklessly and irresponsibly, if you prefer. The government is simply trying to dispose of what capital is left fairly. You can certainly disgree with the details, but calling it theft is overlooking the responsibility of the people to whom the money was entrusted in the first place. - Paul Krugman Wins Nobel: Best Supporting Liberal Playing Economist in Cyprus
Dear Comrade Jason,
More correctly, I blame it on the European welfare state. It’s the collapse of the European welfare state that created the crisis to begin with. While it’s proper to lay blame on the banks, too, you’d have to indict ALL banks in that case.
But that’s beside the point.
If you don’t understand the difference between a depositor losing money because the bank they used went under and the government coming in and confiscating a portion of the deposits so that some can be saved and others damned, then you don’t understand anything.
Remember, first they tried to tax ALL depositors, including those who are insured anyway.
And why the “government” of the EU should decide how to fairly apportion winners and losers in this instance is beyond me.
Olewis wrote: I read Ransom for four reason. 1.Cool logic. B. Ethics. And lastly, (hee hee hee) the humor. Thanks John. If you people don't get it, try HuffPo, that should be more your speed. - Paul Krugman Wins Nobel: Best Supporting Liberal Playing Economist in Cyprus
Dear Comrade O,
Oh?
Leave the humor to the professionals.
Maury Joseph wrote: I get it, companies can't become "TOO LARGE" but a Gov't. never gets too big..........hmm - In the Race to be Cheap, Politics Wins
Dear Maury,
No, bigness is a virtue when it comes to government and Obama’s ego.
Ehall wrote: What seems the obvious solution is to limit the size of companies controlled by any one person or family. The limit could be established by taxing any company gross profits exceeding an established limit (0.5% of US GNP?) at 100%. This would force overly large companies to divest or limit growth. Not popular with libertarians, but it is maybe an appropriate extension of Roosevelt's trust busting. - In the Race to be Cheap, Politics Wins
Dear Comrade E,
What seems obvious is that you are either taking too much or too little of some sort of medication with psychotropic qualities. And you’re a liberal. And you know nothing about economics. Or law. Or history.
Bad liberal; bad, bad liberal.
Maybe we can keep some illegal aliens who love this country and send back some liberals in their place.
GatoLuchador wrote: You know, I do lean conservative, but I can find justification for the confiscation: You get what you vote for. If Cypriots keep voting for tax-borrow-and-spend politicians, then they shouldn't complain when they force them to pay up. Pay up or shut up. In fact, the original plan -- where EVERYBODY got their money confiscated -- was better than the last. - EU Goes All Soviet on Rich Russians
Dear Comrade Gato,
I agree that taxing everyone was better than letting some skate and others lose all.
“If anything,” writes the Irish Independent, “the situation is more troubling than a week ago; with the bizarre idea that depositors in one bank should be levied more heavily than in others; that at least one bank would be wound up; and that there would be restrictions on the movement of money in what is supposed to be a monetary union.”
But the fundamental problem is that the Eurozone is unworkable, primarily because there really is no such thing as an economic “union”. It would be like claiming that Mexico, Canada and the United States were in sort of a “union” because of NAFTA.
All such confederacies have failed the test of history.
Michael160 wrote: Won't somebody stand up for the hard working Russian oligarchs! Those poor guys, they stole so much money from their country, paid no taxes on it, and then parked it in various tax havens/money laundries so it could grow at ridiculous perecentage points without in any way benefitting their home country. Paragons of capitalist virtue, in other words, another shining example of how capitalism floats all boats. What would Russia do without these great minds? It's good that the US right wing feels their pain. - EU Goes All Soviet on Rich Russians
Dear Comrade Mike,
Live it up now, Mikey.
This time you think it’s the Russian oligarchs that got theirs. And somehow you think by allowing governments to steal their money that it makes you freer or more prosperous.
Do you think it’s gonna be harder or easier now for governments to steal from ordinary people now that they know how to steal from the richest?
Theft is theft.
But you won’t object to it until it happens to you.
Writes Dr. Thomas Sowell in Can It Happen Here?:
There are more sophisticated ways for governments to take what you have put aside for yourself and use it for whatever the politicians feel like using it for. If they do it slowly but steadily, they can take a big chunk of what you have sacrificed for years to save, before you are even aware, much less alarmed.
That is in fact already happening. When officials of the Federal Reserve System speak in vague and lofty terms about “quantitative easing,” what they are talking about is creating more money out of thin air, as the Federal Reserve is authorized to do — and has been doing in recent years, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a month.
In doing so, it quietly erodes the value of your money.
And by the way, true capitalism is not theft, as you assert. It’s the exact opposite of theft.
From Capitalism.org: “Capitalism is a social system based on the principle of individual rights. Politically, it is the system of laissez-faire (freedom). Legally it is a system of objective laws (rule of law as opposed to rule of man). Economically, when such freedom is applied to the sphere of production its’ result is the free-market.”
rbartlett wrote: I thought this was delicious, Russian kleptocrats getting screwed by European kleptocrat. - EU Goes All Soviet on Rich Russians
Dear Comrade R,
Dude or Dudette, or El Duderino, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing: The word “delicious” as you used it stopped being used at the turn of the 20th Century.
RGR4214 wrote: Another day, another mind-blowing fact about the staggering difference between the haves and the have-nots. Incomes for the bottom 90 percent of Americans only grew by $59 on average between 1966 and 2011 (when you adjust those incomes for inflation), according to an analysis by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston for Tax Analysts. During the same period, the average income for the top 10 percent of Americans rose by $116,071, Johnston found.- The Greatest Recession
Dear Comrade RGR,
So you’re saying that most people are doing about as well- but no worse- as they ever have income-wise? But the top ten percent are doing better? So to stop that, you’ll stop the top people from doing well, because then it will make you feel better about the other people who are doing about the same as they ever have?
As we have demonstrated before, income inequality, so-called, is mostly a product of changes in the composition of households not wages. For example, there are more single-parent households, more women in the workforce, more demographical reasons for income by household to appear smaller compared to those at the top.
“In short, it's those social processes,” writes our contributor Political Calculations, “which have driven demographic changes within U.S. households, that are almost exclusively behind the observed increase in family and household income inequality observed in the U.S. since the 1960s.”
Then there are two other factors to consider: Despite what liberals say, there is very little convincing me that life isn’t better for ordinary people than it was in the 1950s or 1960s or 1970s or 1980s.
Computers, cells phones, mass media, the rationalization of the written word, civil rights, biotechnology and a host of other factors make life less parochial, more mobile, and fairer than previously.
Also, the top 400 billionaires control around $4.2 trillion in wealth, or almost half of the wealth held by the 36,000 millionaires.
The last few decades have been ones of startling innovation and material progress. Great wealth has been created. Has that wealth disproportionally benefited a small group of people?
No. As I wrote previously: Computers, cells phones, mass media, the rationalization of the written word, civil rights, biotechnology and a host of other factors make life less parochial, more mobile, and fairer than previously.
That’s all for this week,
V/r,
JR
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