@Waldgaenger07 In 1980, knowing some school Spanish (see start of Moby Dick for ref) and not wishing to live with my parents for my first summer after college, I traveled to Fort McCoy, with a bus ticket for return and a duffle bag with a book on Descartes and a school copy of Virgil in it.
@Waldgaenger07 I passed my interview with FEMA, as a GS-5 in the US Civil Service, was finger printed, and given a field with 20,000 men, exiled form Cuba's prisons, to live in.
@Waldgaenger07 I told my father 'I have nothing to prepare me for this experience, but the Boy Scouts (I was 1st class and a patrol leader) and Gomer Pyle re-runs.
I will say this... the men Castro sent us are the salt of the Earth.
@walter_bascom I consider the federal debt like this... imagine, for a minute, that it's actually going to be repaid. This requires a workforce paying payroll taxes. Let's suppose, unfairly, that every new worker cohort gets assigned repayment of debt, in its lifetime, for the *month* of hire
@walter_bascom it's arbitrary yes, but then the calc is easy.
We require 250,000 new workers a month to replace losses (hasn't happened in years).
At the beginning of Obama Admin 1, this implied each worker, over his lifetime, would pony up 100k give or take.
After the GFC, that number rose
@walter_bascom ... to around 1-2 million per new worker.
@Waldgaenger07 When Eisenhower coined that phrase, it was a reference to his opponents (he himself was a Pilgrim Society member of the Anglo-American elite, with undoubted credentials... I must recuse myself on Eisenhower btw... my Great Aunt was on his staff and typed up the D-Day invasion...
@Waldgaenger07 ... plans personally. 'Becky Sharp' for whom the auditorium of the ENMU biznes skrewl is named... it used to be a custom in my family for all men to visit her... stories to follow...
@Waldgaenger07 So, leaving aside the fact of the family story she was Eisenhower's mistress (I suspect a lot of the gents in England 'played the game' in those days so nothing special...) she 'followed him after the war and got her Ph.D. at 'Barnard' when he was president of 'Columbia' gem...
Fun fact: I asked my late mother of blessed memory, before she died two years ago -- born 1939, to a mother born 1917, if she had ever heard any 'stories' about the 1918.
She said no, she'd never heard any such stories from her elder relatives, some of whom were born 1860s.
As far as I can tell from this, the effects of such things on our society, even of obvious biowarfare, are entirely a novelty.
We should take into account our own very recent FRAGILITY.
However, be warned that there might be a STRONG FAMBLY/GENERATIONAL bias about the 1918 'flu episode.
The amazing thing there is it was the exact opposite from 2020 COVID -- the elders were immune and the youngters esp. middle aged died.
It's not really all that improbable... the major 'flu outbreaks of the 20th century were the Spanish 'fla (avian chickens at Ft Lawrence, KS, during the WW1 demob)
... the 1957 'Asian Flu and the 1968 'Hong Kong flu'
1957 was probably a biowar accident, as mutations are clock..
I'd guess that COVID consists of not one, but MULTIPLE lab leaks (or intention responses how do we know?) from 2018 to
The abnormal 'flu season in US 2018, the 2019 claims, the spread of 'wuhan' in Europe 2019... all evidence.
I contest Ron Unz claims though based on the fact that I'd bet the Chinese population experienced *at least two* prior exposures to COVID ... the Iranian oldsters croaking is not so suspicious, if you think COVID started in 2018 or 2019.