Quoted Text

Malaysian Muslim council bans yoga
Body condemns ties to Hinduism
BY VIJAY JOSHI The Associated Press

    KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysia’s top Islamic body, fresh from banning tomboys, issued an edict Saturday that prohibits Muslims from practicing yoga, saying that elements of Hinduism in the ancient Indian exercise could corrupt them.
    The National Fatwa Council’s chairman, Abdul Shukor Husin, said many Muslims fail to understand that yoga’s ultimate aim is to be one with a god of a different religion — an explanation disputed by many practitioners who say that yoga need not have a religious element.
    “We are of the view that yoga, which originates from Hinduism, combines physical exercise, religious elements, chanting and worshipping for the purpose of achieving inner peace and ultimately to be one with god,” Abdul Shukor said.
    News of the yoga ban prompted activist Marina Mahathir to wonder what the council will ban next: “What next? Gyms? Most gyms have men and women together. Will that not be allowed any more?”
    The edict reflects the growing influence of conservative Islam in Malaysia, a multiethnic country of 27 million people where the majority Muslim Malays lost seats in March elections and where minority ethnic Chinese and mostly Hindu ethnic Indians have been clamoring for more rights. ...................................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....amp;EntityId=Ar00500

this here is none of our business and just by posting this kind of thing up here makes us a target{ and rightfuly so } for these people. MIND OUR OWN BUSINESS AND WE WONT HAVE THE TERRORISM STUFF PEOPLE

Quoted from 191

this here is none of our business and just by posting this kind of thing up here makes us a target{ and rightfuly so } for these people. MIND OUR OWN BUSINESS AND WE WONT HAVE THE TERRORISM STUFF PEOPLE

• So, I guess John Wilkes Booth didn't agree with your post...Lincoln was just minding his own business when he went out to the theater one night.
  
• Neither did Tim McVeigh when the government didn't look into him before his little trip to Oklahoma City...
  
• Neither did those pilots on 9/11.  
  

Didn't any of these people realize we were minding our own business?  This is what happens when we just sit back and mind our own business.  We are now the world's police force, if only to keep ourselves safe.

You heard him, Kevin...mind your own business! haha

Quoted from 191

this here is none of our business and just by posting this kind of thing up here makes us a target{ and rightfuly so } for these people. MIND OUR OWN BUSINESS AND WE WONT HAVE THE TERRORISM STUFF PEOPLE

Now we have to ban those cheap made clothes we buy at Walmart, Kmart, Macy's, JCPenny's etc........see Sal.....the QUIET WAR....
that would be minding our own business

NOW GET BACK ON LINE AND SEW UP THAT SEAM....OR NO LUNCH FOR YOU!!!!!!!

Senders, forgive me if I say that I’m amazed that you and I have found a ground of agreement, though now and again you’ve brushed on such.

This past Saturday I listened to Dubya’s speech on global economics that he gave to the conference he was attending.  One of his items was that, “The great depression taught us how flawed protectionism can be.”  And at that point, I choked up coffee all over my desk. Nowhere can protectionism be truly considered a major factor in that historical event, but he said it was, so therefore it has to be.  Yeah, right.

For the last three of four decades this country has been doing an amazing job of imitating Spain – Spain when it was an imperialistic power. They ‘bought’ everything.

Let me go back a few steps here; back to the first course I ever took in ‘economics.’ On the very first day the professor laid out a fundamental rule of economics.  He said, “There are three ways and only three ways to increase national wealth: you steal it, you dig it out of the ground, or you make something with what you dig out of the ground.”  Spain had for a century been stealing it; they had looted all of the world they possibly could, and done so in the name of ‘religion.’ And then they went on a buying spree. They bought everything in sight. They even bought two British ship designers to build the armada that sank while trying to attack Britain. They never dug stuff out of the ground, and they never went into the making-stuff mode. The end result was that, in less than a decade they went from being a world class power to nearly a third-world nation.

We’re following a similar course. As a nation, we rose to greatness by ‘making for ourselves.’ When we did that, we put the blue collar guys to work, and set about providing what we needed, and if someone else wanted some, that was an after-thought.  If we could make enough for them, we’d sell them some.

During and after WWII we went into high gear for selling abroad.  Lend-lease was all about that.  Under the Marshall plan, it ruled there too, and not many people know how that really worked.  We gave France, for instance, millions of dollars worth of basic machinery. Tractors, trucks, you name it. France the nation got to sell those items to their population but pocket the money, building up France’s treasury.  The down side of this was that the French farmer came to dislike the USA – after all, he’d been forced to pay full price for that John Deere, and never quite got where his money actually wound up.

For a long while after that, we were a ‘seller’ nation, soliciting global markets, and believing that our wares would always be better than anyone else.  Enter Japan.  The Japanese entered the global market by making essentially junk goods, but they were making them, and people were buying their ‘toys’ because they were dirt cheap, both in price and quality.  And then this really silly thing showed up called, The Honda Civic – what the world was coming to.  Initially, except for its gas mileage, it wasn’t much of a car: little, boxy, unglamorous, questionable.  However, with those cars, and Japanese cameras (Nikon and Canon) to name a few items, Japan developed new manufacturing concepts that began producing extremely good products.  And we began buying at that point.  In cameras they really found a niche – we didn’t really make any quality cameras beyond the huge Speed Graphics that all the press guys used.  Photo enthusiasts bought German Cameras; Leicas and Hasselblads.  Suddenly, Japan introduced the Canon, the Nikon, and the Minolta which catered to a huge span of photographers, and because their fundamental manufacturing concepts were radical and innovative, their cameras were more affordable.  They did the same thing to cars, to motorcycles, to just about everything – they began producing quality goods cheaper, and we bought.

Item by item, one at a time, because of the corporate inertia here in this country, better, cheaper goods started coming ashore in quantity. To combat this, American industry started ‘out-sourcing’ its manufacturing, and we arrived where we are today.

Yup, I’d love to buy an American made Black and Decker power drill.  There are two problems though.  The first is, there ain’t no such critter no more.  The second is, if there were, I couldn’t afford it.  Back when Black and Decker was American made, I was making five bucks an hour, so buying a fifteen dollar drill or circular saw wasn’t such a big deal.  Now, that all-American made item costs about ten times as much, or about one hundred fifty dollars, only now blue-collar me isn’t making fifty dollars an hour.  If I’m lucky, I’m making ten to twelve dollars an hour.  Such is the nature of global, we buy everything, economics.

We’ll be able to compete in a global economy with people from rural China when we’re ready to work for ten bucks a day, or less. Otherwise, we’ve been trapped, you and I.  We’ve been sold NAFTA, and CAFTA, and with any luck, they’ll get us to buy into MAI.  The owners of Nike, and a whole lot of other ‘American’ companies can move their manufacturing plants to the next cheaper labor market in a heartbeat, and we’re stuck here.  We actually are more or less forced to Wally-world, because it’s the only place where we can afford some of the things we need.

We can recover.  However, you’d have to sell each and every American on the concept that such short-term sacrifice would be long-term beneficial.  Won’t happen.  We want it all, and right now.  So folks, welcome to the new Spain.  Read, unless you’re willing to fight for it, and pay serious dues, it’ll only get a lot worse – worse than if you’d paid those dues and then some.  Have a nice day!

You're a ray of sunshine Ock   that said,  I can't diagree with your post.

Quoted from 246

On the very first day the professor laid out a fundamental rule of economics.  He said, “There are three ways and only three ways to increase national wealth: you steal it, you dig it out of the ground, or you make something with what you dig out of the ground.”  

Your professor forgot intellectual properties.  And I'm not talking about an op ed in the Daily Gazette.  I'm talking about invention and innovation, that is where America's wealth derives.  This thing we're using right now call the World Wide Web is just another example of American innovation that changed the world and created billions of new wealth without stealing, mining or building something out of what we mined.  Cisco System, Google, Yahoo, E-Bay, Amazon,...........would you like me to continue?

Quoted from 246

This past Saturday I listened to Dubya’s speech on global economics that he gave to the conference he was attending.  One of his items was that, “The great depression taught us how flawed protectionism can be.”  And at that point, I choked up coffee all over my desk. Nowhere can protectionism be truly considered a major factor in that historical event, but he said it was, so therefore it has to be.  Yeah, right.

It's common for Bush haters to mock his intelligence with unfounded and contemptuous remarks.  I would agree that Mr. Bush may have passed public speaking with D's while attending Yale, I believe his grasp of history and economics, especially relating to the Great Depression, he may have scored higher.  Admittedly, an often disputed fact, is the role of the Smoot-Hawley tariff and its contribution to the Great Depression.   Whatever the degree, the effect certainly was adverse and the tariff was certainly bad policy. The world trade virtually collapsed following passage of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. Therefore, if that tariff was not the single cause of the Great Depression, it certainly made a bad situation worse.

So to your assertion that protectionism played no role in the Great Depression, I suggest you go to your favorite search engine and type in Smoot-Hawley. Then come back and post a comment explaining why you choked on your coffee when Bush relates protectionism to the Great Depression.

How are you going to live with yourself when find out Bush taught you something?  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot-Hawley_Tariff_Act

Regardless of the policies and their titles via the politicos, no matter which party......people will generally do the same thing over and over and over
and take the road with less bumps, holes, stumps etc......we like it easy......ie: if a lion is hungry does it take down the strong animal there by using
all is energy, or will it take down the smaller/weaker animal thereby saving it's bodily resources for another chase??? we like things cheap and easy
raise your hand if you have a cleaning woman/man, mechanic, landscaper, etc????? yup, that's us.......American....great as we are....we cannot
afford ourselves and being the 'engine' for the world economy,,they cant afford us either......

so what is the new horizon I ask..........it's there and we can almost touch it.......polyester is a has been......there is a rumble about to take place

I no longer have his book The Great Crash, but in it Smoot-Hawley only gets a passing mention. According to J. Kenneth Galbraith (a fair noodler of things economic) one of the most devastating contributing factors was the Federal Reserve.  There was a Manhattan bank (whose name I’ve forgotten but can go find if it seems important to anyone) that was run by and mostly patronized by Jews. It was the first in NYC to experience a ‘run,’ and it did what it was supposed to; it contacted the Fed for a short-term loan.  That was part of the Fed’s charter, and because of what seems like simple prejudice, they didn’t do their job.  Hence, the bank failed in short order, setting off the dominoes.

In the world of banking there are some fundamentals at work.  First of all, when you put money in a bank, money is created.  You have your money in the bank, and the borrower has it in his pocket, so the supply of money has doubled.

The second fundamental that history has taught, and one that the Fed was specifically created to address, states that, “If a depositor can get his or her money, they almost never want it.”  If the Fed had done its job, the 1929 bank runs might never have gotten off the ground.  However, having a bank fail, and having that become well publicized kicked off a nation wide run on banks – everyone wanted to see if they could get their money.  And as predicted by this axiom, at those places where they could, most simply put the money back.

One banker, not in Galbraith’s book, but that I’d read about years ago, dealt with the problem shrewdly.  His lobby was mobbed by the time the Fed money bags arrived.  So he stood up on the counter holding them in the air and let everyone there see that he had ‘plenty of money.’  His second clever act was to have the tellers be ‘overly thorough.’  They took a great deal of time checking the account, and counted the cash slowly three times before handing it over to the person making the withdrawal, and he closed the doors on time and told most of the people to just come back in the morning.  The next morning, he used exactly the opposite tactic.  He had the tellers get the money into the early arrivals hands as quickly as they could, and walked each and every customer quickly to the door, so that when the crowd started to arrive, the place was empty.  Just about everyone turned around and went home, satisfied that there were no problems.

The fundamental rule of banking is, you don’t want the depositor and the borrower to want the money at the same time, and here again, the Fed was supposed to help discourage that part and didn’t.

Most of the money lost in 1929 was never really there in the first place.  Leading up to the crash, it wasn’t uncommon for people to be able to get 80% margins on their stock holdings – borrow 80% of its value.  So I go in and buy $100 worth of stock.  Then the bank lends me $80 and I buy that much stock.  So now they loan me $64, and I buy that much stock. I can now get $51.20, and I buy that much stock and they loan me $40.96.  In five transactions I’ve only spent $100 but own $336.16 worth of stock.  What’s bad is when the person lending me the money wants it back, because I’ve borrowed $236.16 based upon that fact that I had a $100.  Of course, when I try to get that big-buck back, by the time I get to sell, it’s gone too.  Such was, and is, margin.

Big money made huge sums during the early days of the crash before the ‘last-tick’ rule was instituted by ‘selling short,’ a mystical process that is still legal today for some reasons I don’t wholly comprehend.

In short, restraint of trade was not a contributing factor to the crash, though it possibly worsened things in some sectors for a while.

A reality that this country now has to face is that we’ve been on a buying spree for half a century now, only during the last quarter of a century, we’ve also been dismantling our own industry.  We cannot compete with many workers – simple as that.  Very few in this country have the work ethic that most people in India, for example, take as routine.  They will work a full twelve hours a day, six days a week, and with minimal supervision.  And they’ll be happy or even thrilled to do it for a total burden of $25k/year (burden is the total cost of an employee to an employer, for those who wondered).  I’m not talking about grunts and ditch-diggers. I referring to engineers, systems analysts, designers, you name it.  Begin by studying up on IIT and go from there.  IIT grads have been known to move on to Stamford and Cal-Poly to get a ‘western’ degree, and to take it easy for a few years.  Stamford is easy?  They think so.

As to innovations being a source of revenue, not hardly.  Innovations are great when we can do something with them.  I come up with a new macro-device that does in-body cancer analysis.  Where in this country do I go to get it into production? What do I do with that great intellectual property? I have it manufactured off shore because no one here can do it.  And have you been following Science magazine and Scientific American and seeing where the big innovations are coming from?  Not many from the US these days.  As to where the real money's being made on the internet? Open up the box on your computer and tell me what you see.

Restrictive tariffs are not considered by most serious economists to be a major factor in the depression.  Yes, I do truly dislike president Dubya, mostly because he’s a liar and a cheat (remember back in 2000 when he was going to go directly to the electoral college and get votes changed if he had to?).  He’s broken his word to the congress and to the people, he’s reneged on his promises to the same parties, he’s lied outright, he’s overseen the breaking of federal law, and he’s had laws enforced that aren’t on any books. I gather those issues make him your kind of man, right Cicero? But then you are the, “Vi et armis,” person at the campfire here.

After reading all of that, I gather from it that you do agree protectionism(Smoot-Hawley) played a roll in the deepening of the Great Depression, just as Dubya suggests.  Even if, as you claim, it may have only effected certain industries.  Though I disagree on that point, seeing how overall U.S. exports to Europe declined from $2,341 million in 1929 to $784 million in 1932. While U.S. imports from Europe declined from a 1929 high of $1,334 million to just $390 million in 1932.  A 66% decrease in exports seems to be a number representing more than just a few industries.  American protectionism obviously provoked a storm of foreign retaliatory measures and came to stand as a symbol of the "beggar-thy-neighbor" policies, or improving one's own lot at the expense of that of others.

Bush is not "my kind of man", and my post wasn't an attempt to defend Bush or his administration, or any policies he's enacted, or legislation he's signed into law. I'm not the protector at the campfire as you so cleverly suggest, just making sure that your hatred for Dubya doesn't get in the way of your presentation of facts.  So I guess I would be the Vi et armis of truth, by protecting readers from those skillful writers like yourself, who attempt to blur the line of opinion and fact.

...what does any of this have to do with the muzzies imposing Sharia law on all those they can push around?

Quoted from GrahamBonnet

...what does any of this have to do with the muzzies imposing Sharia law on all those they can push around?

I plead 'guilty as charged,' and banish myself for the rest of the day.


(Yeah, okay - so I'm working the rest of the day - sounded good....)