Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

Jim Babcock said:
What about symbols? Are they hate crimes? This article says police are looking to arrest someone, but shouldn't this at best be a trespassing violation?

It's also vandalism.

jeff catalina said:
Your fascination with Hillary borders on psychotic, Jim. If you spent half as much time posting about potential republican nominees and their policies as you do slamming Hill you might actually be able to make a legitimate point once in a while. Maybe. :S

Personally I think he's part of a vast and well-orchestrated republican conspiracy to ensure that Hillary ends up being the democratic candidate.

I can almost hear Jim and Patrick in the boiler room: "Quick! We need more Hillary threads on Astromart!"

Jim Babcock said:
I actually agree with much of what you say. However in recent times, the left has been very anti-religion. If you read some of the threads here or better yet look at the religion forum you will see a general disdain for organized religion.

The religion forum is a very different animal, especially on a website for a scientific hobby which would, by its nature, contain an unusually high representation of atheists and agnostics as well as cosmic-minded highly religious types.

The left is not anti-religion -- they're just against anti-reason, opposing the rising tide of intolerant religious fundamentalism here that mimics similar trends in Islam elsewhere in the world, as well as worrisome attempts by the right to strengthen their religion's influences within government.

Jim Babcock said:
When Clinton was President corporations like Enron regularly lied on their financials. Heck they were encouraged by the Administration with their "it's the economy stupid" motto. I personally know CEOs and CFOs who took it as a message from Washington that the Clinton Administration would not go after them because Clinton wanted a legacy of running a great economy.

Okay, so you're saying the desire for a strong economy is bad and encourages corporate crime. So the take away from this is... people should vote for candidates who say they want a poor economy? Interesting strategy, but I don't see a lot of candidates from either repubs or dems going for that position in '08. You'll probably have to go third-party.

Lee Spain said:
What do y'all think about cases where an illegal alien is allowed to enlist in the U.S. military and receives his or her green card, but their spouse and kids face deportation?

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/10/03/military.deportation/index.html

My feeling is that the spouse and kids should be entitled to a green card based on their military camp follower status and that their pathway toward citizenship should be expedited.

Judging by the prevailing rhetoric here on this subject, I would say the consensus answer will probably be:

1) The wife and child are wanted criminals and clearly destined for a life of crime; some will say moreover that they are also 'invaders'.
2) Given the fact that they are 'invaders', it is presumably the soldier-husband's duty to defend his country by detaining his wife and child, and shooting them if they resist.

Jim Babcock said:
It is difficult to be a uniter with people who continue to use their dirty tricks to destroy your Presidency. This article could never be published in a major news outlet in the US. It is amazing that their dirty tricksters have not hacked the BBC site to have it removed.

The dirty tricksters that destroyed this presidency are Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al. This is the group that brought down the Republican congress. GWB might have been a uniter, I think, if he had not surrounded himself with evil people. You can try to blame it on the dems if you want, but trust me, they're neither powerful enough nor organized enough. There's no Dem version of Karl Rove to run a dirty-tricks & character-assassination lab.

jess tauber said:
The equivalent characters from the US may be a lesser breed in terms of raw violence and sadism,

Give it time, it's a very slippery slope. It's also contagious. The excuse will be if the U.S. does it, it must be okay, so we can expect to see more torture of our soldiers by future enemies.

What's worse of course is the fact that as a tactic it is self-defeating in a democratic society. When you give up the moral high ground you can expect to lose much of your domestic support for whatever effort you are pursuing. You make your cause less noble.

Looks like the dissonance is being broken by today's jobs report. Stocks and precious metals are rallying and the bond market is selling off sharply.

Doug Grebe said:
I am starting to have mixed feelings about the financial numbers that the Government produces. I think that most responders here feel that the opposite party to their own political party will say anything to get or stay in power and if most of us feel that way why are we believing them when they give financial numbers to us. I agree that if I don't believe them then the greenbacks in my wallet are useless but I am starting to question all numbers from the government no matter who is in power. What is your take on this?

The greenbacks in your wallet are worth whatever your fellow citizens believe their worth. That's the bottom line. It's just a symbol to represent the work you've produced, a polite fiction maintained by everyone to facilitate an exchange of goods and services less cumbersome than pure barter.

Lee Spain said:
The international fund in my 401K seems to be doing very well. But, it puzzles me. I'm puzzled about how currency fluctuations might affect it. If the dollar regains strength, will my international fund automatically decline?

Not automatically, any more than a falling dollar makes your U.S. investments decline -- other factors come into play, such as how rapid/gradual the decline is, specifically how the falling dollar impacts the various countries making up the international portfolio (which depend on such factors as what industry concentrations they have, their relative trade balance with the U.S. and so on)

I would say it is generally 'worth it' to be invested overseas to some degree regardless of the fluctuations in the exchange rates from one year to the next, just for diversification purposes, but I wouldn't throw in a whole lump of one's portfolio suddenly at one time. And there's the fact that many other economies will be growing faster than ours because they're growing from a much less developed level (though this is partially offset by a greater pace of "creative destruction" that causes more companies to go bankrupt as well as prosper) I mean, from an investor's point of view, it seems somewhat foolish to be concentrated in just one country, even if it is your own. If nothing else it can, like commodity stocks, serve as a partial hedge against dollar fluctuations on the international markets.