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05-23-2004, 05:33 PM

The MILITARY????? You've got to be kidding? Have you any close friends who currently serve in our armed forces? My Dad was a 30 year "lifer" in the US Army. I have a close friend who served in the army for 7 years and is a Gulf War vet. A second friend of mine spent his entire career as an Air Force officer and taught at the most prestigous military school, the United States Air Force Academy. The stories that they tell about military bungling, stupidity, waste of resources and disregard for the enlisted men who serve within its ranks are hair raising. I respect the courage and the honor of our individual soldiers who serve in the military. I am filled with contempt for the heirarchy of the Army and the Department of Defense, as well as the politicians who send these young men off to die in dishonorable and needless wars.

Your little essay which you quoted regarding "hard" versus "soft" left out a teensy little fact. Japan and Europe had no manufacturing infrastructure left after WWII. Everything in those countries was in ruins. The US had a virtual world monopoly on the making and trade of manufactured goods. US companies had no competition internationally and the money poured in.

Alas, Europe and Japan had finally begun to rebuild enough to become competitive in the 70's. The US had also begun to become ever more dependent on foreign oil. There are a few of us around who remember when gasoline prices suddenly went from around .25 cents a gallon to a $1.00 or more. These two things were a heavy blow to American corporations, which far from being "hard" had become soft and lazy in the 50's and 60's.
CEO's with little imagination and even less regard for their employees or their nation, outsourced their labor pools to countries where children would work for$1.00 a day. The willingness of the individual American working man to do a decent job had little if any impact on this decision. The name of the game was merely to keep the profits high by any means.

Their is no logical reason to correlate a drop-off in the provision of social services with a drop in the over-all crime rate, Logic would say, that if anything, the converse would be true. I glanced over the statistics from the department of justice myself and noticed an interesting little footnote. In 1995, they changed some of their reporting methodology. Co-incidentally, that was the same year the crime rate began to go down. Big Brother trying to make itself look good by lying with statistics? There is as much or more evidence for the second hypothesis as the first.

05-23-2004, 05:33 PM	#3
marichiko Guest Posts: n/a	The MILITARY????? You've got to be kidding? Have you any close friends who currently serve in our armed forces? My Dad was a 30 year "lifer" in the US Army. I have a close friend who served in the army for 7 years and is a Gulf War vet. A second friend of mine spent his entire career as an Air Force officer and taught at the most prestigous military school, the United States Air Force Academy. The stories that they tell about military bungling, stupidity, waste of resources and disregard for the enlisted men who serve within its ranks are hair raising. I respect the courage and the honor of our individual soldiers who serve in the military. I am filled with contempt for the heirarchy of the Army and the Department of Defense, as well as the politicians who send these young men off to die in dishonorable and needless wars. Your little essay which you quoted regarding "hard" versus "soft" left out a teensy little fact. Japan and Europe had no manufacturing infrastructure left after WWII. Everything in those countries was in ruins. The US had a virtual world monopoly on the making and trade of manufactured goods. US companies had no competition internationally and the money poured in. Alas, Europe and Japan had finally begun to rebuild enough to become competitive in the 70's. The US had also begun to become ever more dependent on foreign oil. There are a few of us around who remember when gasoline prices suddenly went from around .25 cents a gallon to a $1.00 or more. These two things were a heavy blow to American corporations, which far from being "hard" had become soft and lazy in the 50's and 60's. CEO's with little imagination and even less regard for their employees or their nation, outsourced their labor pools to countries where children would work for$1.00 a day. The willingness of the individual American working man to do a decent job had little if any impact on this decision. The name of the game was merely to keep the profits high by any means. Their is no logical reason to correlate a drop-off in the provision of social services with a drop in the over-all crime rate, Logic would say, that if anything, the converse would be true. I glanced over the statistics from the department of justice myself and noticed an interesting little footnote. In 1995, they changed some of their reporting methodology. Co-incidentally, that was the same year the crime rate began to go down. Big Brother trying to make itself look good by lying with statistics? There is as much or more evidence for the second hypothesis as the first.