death rates of white middle class American males

[Ragnarök_62]

(02-23-2017, 12:02 PM)The Wonkette Wrote:

(02-22-2017, 08:17 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: 1. Here's what I find strange. What about planting a garden?   I think you can get quite a bang for the buck if seeds were allowed.  I know this firsthand.  Just today, I planted onions in my garden. It's that time in Oklahoma. Later, I'll plant some ghost peppers which are really, really nutritious.  Yeah, they're hot as hell, but that's what makes 'em so good. Capsaisin's an antioxidant and it literally burns fat away. I also wonder to no ends why wild edibles aren't mentioned. Dandelions are not weeds, but very nutritious salad greens. Yeah, I don't apply weed killer to my dandelions, but rather harvest them from the lawn and make salad from them. So, dude, you're correct, man does not live by bread alone. henbit is another green I use for salads.

I'm not sure what you mean by "if seeds are allowed".  Regarding food stamps (SNAP), you are allowed to purchase seeds.  https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/eligible-food-items.

1. Seeds:  That's nice, thanks.
2. Here's a puzzler. Papa Murphey's I think they're using the "not cooked" and "not consumed locally" clauses as loopholes. So...

I guess adding a clause "establishments which are restaurants are forbidden from accepting SNAP EBT cards" should work.

https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/...223880.htm

[Eric the Green]

video of part 2 of PBS Newshour report on premature deaths of White Americans.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/videos/#207888





HARI SREENIVASAN: But first: the second of a two-part look at the declining life expectancy for some middle-aged white Americans.

Last week, economics correspondent Paul Solman examined the role prescription painkillers and alcohol may play in the trend.

Tonight, he explores how the economy and the job market may be involved.

Its part of our weekly series Making Sense, which airs Thursdays.

PAUL SOLMAN: The Hardee’s in Maysville, Kentucky, a popular hangout for the senior set.

Martin Sauer used to work for the sheriff’s department, where he says he saw his share of Saturday night drunks, but nothing like the current opioid drug epidemic.

MARTIN SAUER, Kentucky: People get hooked on it and can’t get off of it, or don’t want to, causing a lot of younger generation to lose their lives.

PAUL SOLMAN: And by younger generation, Sauer means his middle-aged neighbors, who, as we reported last week, are experiencing a stunning rise in premature deaths due to alcoholism, suicide and drug abuse. But why?

ANGUS DEATON, Economist: The health crisis here is particularly among white working-class or white people with a high school and no more. For those people, the economy’s been very hard for a very long time.

PAUL SOLMAN: Predictably, Angus Deaton and Anne Case, economists who have documented the dramatic decrease in life expectancy, say an obvious place to look for a cause is the economy.

ANNE CASE, Economist: It used to be, with a high school degree, you could get a job, that actually could provide for your family. And the disappearance of those may lead people to feel a lot more stressed.

PAUL SOLMAN: Indeed, in the period covered by their study, 1999-2014, inflation-adjusted income for households headed by a high school graduate fell by 19 percent.

Well away from the Ivory Tower, on the ground in Maysville, Wayne Pendleton has lived the change.

WAYNE PENDLETON, Kentucky: Maysville, when we moved here, was a pretty well flourishing little town right here. But we have lived here, what, 17 years? And you can just name the stuff that’s left here. You can’t take a job away from a guy 55 years old and expect him to start all over again.

SHERMAN SAUNDERS, Kentucky: Even at my age, it’s depressing if you’re not trying to do something.

PAUL SOLMAN: Despite four heart attacks, Sherman Saunders still wants to work.

SHERMAN SAUNDERS: That’s not someone else’s responsibility to take care of the family. It’s supposed to be yours. You have to go to work to do that yourself.

MARCY CONNER, Nurse: Most of the men aren’t working.

PAUL SOLMAN: Marcy Conner, a nurse specializing in substance abuse, has a close-up view of the downward spiral.

MARCY CONNER: All of a sudden, you lose your job. So, here is a male with no identity. He’s not working. He’s supposed to be a provider for his family. He can’t even do that. So that low self-worth, along with that hopelessness feeling, we start seeing tremendous depression.

So, how do you relieve depression? You can relieve it with drug use, alcohol use, or suicide.

PAUL SOLMAN: Conner’s own husband died of alcohol poisoning.

MARCY CONNER: Poured alcohol down his feeding tube until he died.

PAUL SOLMAN: The husband of best friend Becky Manning also killed himself.

BECKY MANNING, Widow: He blew his head off.

PAUL SOLMAN: Joseph Manning had been a truck driver for 30 years.

BECKY MANNING: And then he retired at 55, which then gave him nothing to do.

Then he started getting depressed. And then we would go to different doctors, and then they would just try different drugs. And those never worked, because they caused side effects, which made him feel worse about himself.

PAUL SOLMAN: Right, weight gain?

BECKY MANNING: Yes, he gained weight.

PAUL SOLMAN: Libido?

BECKY MANNING: Absolutely, where I’m worthless. I can’t be here for my wife, you know?

PAUL SOLMAN: So when you hear about the end of work, the jobs, like truck driving jobs …

BECKY MANNING: Right.

PAUL SOLMAN: … which will be replaced by…

BECKY MANNING: Absolutely.

PAUL SOLMAN: … self driving cars, you think?

BECKY MANNING: What are these men going to do? Yes.

MARCY CONNER: In this next generation, I think you’re going to see the death rate continue to climb.

PAUL SOLMAN: Local doctor Craig Denham buys into the economic hypothesis.

DR. WILLIAM CRAIG DENHAM, Family Physician: Economics is a major component. Job availability is a major component.

PAUL SOLMAN: So, case closed. Economics explains the epidemic of suicide and overdose deaths ravaging America’s white working-class.

Not so fast, say Case and Deaton.

ANNE CASE: Because Europeans have suffered too in this — the jobs leaving the country, but we don’t see them killing themselves.

ANGUS DEATON: Yes, you know, Spain suffered. The unemployment rate went from 5 percent to like 25 percent. And the health improved.

PAUL SOLMAN: And what about working-class black Americans?

ANNE CASE: African-Americans’ rates of death from suicide, drug overdose and alcohol have been flat. They have not risen.

DARRICK HAMILTON, Economist: It’s not as if stress is something new to the black American population. We have been dealing with stress for quite a long time.

PAUL SOLMAN: Economist Darrick Hamilton.

DARRICK HAMILTON: The impact of stress is not new, so that’s why you’re probably not seeing an uptick the way it is for whites. We’re used to struggle, unfortunately.

ANGUS DEATON: And also there’s this argument on the other side that whites have been ahead for so long that, when they see their world coming apart, even though they’re still doing much better than blacks, then they see equalization as oppression.

ROBERT FRANK, Economist: The group that they studied is one that has, by almost every concrete measure, been falling behind in recent decades.

PAUL SOLMAN: Economist Bob Frank has devoted much of his career to the study of inequality.

ROBERT FRANK: Life is graded on the curve. It’s not how well you do in absolute terms. It’s how well you do relative to your competitors.

PAUL SOLMAN: Or relative to your own past.

ROBERT FRANK: And if you’re in a chronic loser position, I think that’s a position that just wears people down eventually.

PAUL SOLMAN: Psychologically and physiologically, as low status is linked to decreased serotonin in the brain, which can cause dysphoria, a state of intense unease and distress.

ROBERT FRANK: If you’re exposed to having low status in a chronic way and experiencing protracted feelings of dysphoria, it’s not surprising that many people would turn to drink and drugs as a way to alleviate such feelings.

PAUL SOLMAN: In fact, according to a recent study by
economist Alan Krueger, middle-aged men who have dropped out of the labor force report notably low levels of emotional well-being, and more than half take pain medication every day.

ANGUS DEATON: And so, if you suffer enough, and your kids are not doing very well, and the world’s going to hell in a handbasket, then suicide, either directly or through painkillers or alcohol, might seem like a not completely crazy thing to do.

PAUL SOLMAN: There is, we should acknowledge, another take on the rise in so-called deaths of despair.

ANTHONY FLANNERY, Kentucky: I don’t buy into the everything fell apart, so now I just — I can’t do nothing. I still believe in the American dream.

PAUL SOLMAN: Anthony Flannery, who works long hours in health care, and on funding his dream of making music full-time, doesn’t dispute the data. He just doesn’t think they provide an excuse or even much of an explanation.

ANTHONY FLANNERY: So people that lay around and give up, I don’t relate to it. It’s like, OK, I can understand getting knocked down, and now you, oh, I don’t know what to do. I’m overwhelmed.

I get that. I have been there countless times. But you have to get focused, pick yourself up, find a direction, and make it happen in your life and for your family.

PAUL SOLMAN: But if the problem is a decline in moral fiber, what would explain that? Too easy access to remedies that seem to cure all problems, until they become the problem themselves, or, longer term, the deteriorating economics of white working-age America, relative to any and all expectations?

For the PBS NewsHour, economics correspondent Paul Solman, reporting from Kentucky.

[gabrielle]

(02-22-2017, 08:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(02-21-2017, 10:48 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(02-17-2017, 01:05 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: I might post the next report next week. But meanwhile, what do you think are the causes of this trend?

I have my opinions, of course....

This statistic started with boomers in 1999 from the age of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton to about the age of Mark Warner and Lindsay Graham, and has increased markedly since then until today for Xers from the age of Chris Christie to about the age of Marco Rubio. The line runs upward from 1999 to today for those aged 45-54.

It concentrates among those without higher education.

These are the folks who put Trump in the White House. Still enough of them around to do that, I guess.

This sickness is contagious.

Many of them have lost jobs. Many of them are using drugs and overdosing. There is increased social isolation and seclusion. Suicides are rampant.

I think culture is important; the fact that TV, music, movies are so vacuous and negative in these days of the 3T and 4T. This makes a difference. And this extends to decline of social gathering places like churches, union halls, clubs, and families of people that have moved away, with many left behind in red states because of industrial decline. Guns make suicide easy, and drugs and alcohol make self-medication and escape easy.

Americans have such empty lives that if they lose their job, they can't see any purpose for themselves. This is due to the inherent emptiness of our culture, and inability to recognize what life is about, despite the counter-cultural movements that revealed it, but were ignored and condemned in white middle red-state America. Like maybe doing some creative things: the arts, science, entreprenuership, new relationships or family, contributing to and helping others, going back to school, or moving to a blue state where culture and opportunity is greater. Unwillingness to take the financial risk of change because money is too tight. If your life is empty, and thus doesn't get you high or fulfilled on life, it's easier to take a drug or a drink to get a false and addictive high instead. Despair leads to self-destruction.

The economic stresses are caused by computer automation, free trade, and wage and salary decline due to concentration of income for the bosses; plus a failed education and cultural system, and poor social services and lack of investment in public infrastructure.

And of course, you can make the situation even much worse by taking out your frustration and despair on liberals and voting Republican, because you are brainwashed into one of their ideologies that hook you: blame the colored people, blame immigrants, blame PC and identity politics, blame women and feminism, blame non-Christians and lax morality, blame welfare recipients, blame taxes, blame gun control, and don't question the bosses, but look to them for salvation, because they are the "job creaters" and are not "dependent," or you can also fall for religious right nostrums and "make America great again!" or patriotic and militarist slogans. When your life is empty, you can't question authority or think critically and with imagination, and you are ripe fruit and easy pickins for a demagogue like Trump. The result is that there are no social services or income supports to help boost you and your community out of economic ruin and emotional despair. No, that would be dependency on big government, and I am too strong and self-reliant to do that. Oh pardon me, I need to get my fix......

America is sick, literally, and needs a great big change, and soon. Something to blast these people out of their deadly self-defeating patterns! There is a greater destiny for America, hidden in our history and our western and world culture, if only we can find it again. If only we can look past our despair and prejudice.

Eric you are looking at this through a 2T filter. RE: bold text.

If the average person loses their job, they lose the benefits that go with the job. Especially health care and dental. Plus others. They lose cash flow. If one is living paycheck to paycheck, that means immediate distress. Loss of purpose is the least of their worries.

Either there need to be enough jobs to employ those who are not knowledge workers, or, there needs to be universal income.

So far, Americans seem to be behaving more like Germany in the 1930s than America in the 1930s. The economically challenged are looking to fear and prejudice promoted by demagogues than to liberal social programs for answers to their plight. Is that because Americans today are more cultural and intellectually deprived than they were in the 1930s? They can't see the solutions; they only react to fear and prejudice.

Was Germany culturally and intellectually deprived leading up to the 1930s?  

Or was there a lot of culture, but much of the population was unresponsive, or hostile, to it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_culture

Either way, I guess it leads to the same thing.  But I disagree with you about the past 3 and 4 Ts being devoid of culture.

[pbrower2a]

Can people have the structure and purpose of a job while doing leisure? Sure. That is how academics and creative people have lived, earning their way by doing what many of us consider fun.

Yes, there have been creative people who led miserable lives (Modest Mussorgsky, Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf) due to their own demons. So what. So can anyone. There have been dissolute heirs -- and laborers. There have always been drugs, booze, and venereal disease, snares for the foolish and reckless.

I'll go further. Ask people about their vacations. The happiest reports of their vacations will involve qualities associated with desirable work habits -- planning, scheduling, budgeting, priority-setting, and research. They had some idea of what they wanted to do, and just as importantly, what they didn't want to do. I want to see something new and different, or at least refreshing.

[SomeGuy]

Quote:OK, but what alternative are you suggesting?  Gaming the system, which is what you  are noting here, requires one to look broken to get money ... so they look broken.  Yes, the system gets scammed frequently.  A system that required no scamming, might solve a lot of the downside issues you see ... or not.  At some point, universal income, or something similar, will be tried out of desperation.  Then we'll know.

WTF?  I point out that we have effectively had years if not decades of experience with large numbers of people subsisting largely off of government checks and the evidence seems to suggest that many of those people basically rot away and you mention... "scamming"?  

Did your mother have any other children that lived?

[David Horn]

(02-24-2017, 11:19 AM)SomeGuy Wrote:

Quote:OK, but what alternative are you suggesting?  Gaming the system, which is what you  are noting here, requires one to look broken to get money ... so they look broken.  Yes, the system gets scammed frequently.  A system that required no scamming, might solve a lot of the downside issues you see ... or not.  At some point, universal income, or something similar, will be tried out of desperation.  Then we'll know.

WTF?  I point out that we have effectively had years if not decades of experience with large numbers of people subsisting largely off of government checks and the evidence seems to suggest that many of those people basically rot away and you mention... "scamming"?  

Did your mother have any other children that lived?

Your declaration and fact do not have to coexist.  Yes, there are many who do poorly on subsidies, and others who take advantage and excel.  Then there are those who know the system and how to use it.  Why are any of these variants unusual?  Oh yeah, they aren't.

FWIW, my wife works in a Federally funded healthcare clinic, and the scammers are in evidence daily.  So are the ones working hard to do well.  The ones just hanging around waiting to die ... them too.

[SomeGuy]

Quote:Your declaration and fact do not have to coexist.

Could you rewrite this in English, please?

Quote:Yes, there are many who do poorly on subsidies, and others who take advantage and excel.

What would "excel" mean in the context of a hypothesized situation where there was no work to be had?  Etsy?  

Quote:Then there are those who know the system and how to use it.  Why are any of these variants unusual?  Oh yeah, they aren't.

Who are you arguing with? 

Quote:FWIW, my wife works in a Federally funded healthcare clinic, and the scammers are in evidence daily.  So are the ones working hard to do well.  The ones just hanging around waiting to die ... them too.

Again, this is almost a complete non sequiter.  I never argued for or against the existence of "scammers", I pointed out that our existing social safety net has been evolving into something similar to what you have been proposing and the outcomes are not particularly good, as demonstrated by numerous articles linked to/posted in this thread.  This whole question of whether or not someone of those people "should" be on disability or what have you is beside the point.  The point is that they are, and that far from being a solution it seems to be part of the present problem, in the sense that it is not really improving their condition, not that they are "taking advantage" of the system.

[Eric the Green]

(02-24-2017, 12:07 AM)gabrielle Wrote:

(02-22-2017, 08:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(02-21-2017, 10:48 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(02-17-2017, 01:05 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: I might post the next report next week. But meanwhile, what do you think are the causes of this trend?

I have my opinions, of course....

This statistic started with boomers in 1999 from the age of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton to about the age of Mark Warner and Lindsay Graham, and has increased markedly since then until today for Xers from the age of Chris Christie to about the age of Marco Rubio. The line runs upward from 1999 to today for those aged 45-54.

It concentrates among those without higher education.

These are the folks who put Trump in the White House. Still enough of them around to do that, I guess.

This sickness is contagious.

Many of them have lost jobs. Many of them are using drugs and overdosing. There is increased social isolation and seclusion. Suicides are rampant.

I think culture is important; the fact that TV, music, movies are so vacuous and negative in these days of the 3T and 4T. This makes a difference. And this extends to decline of social gathering places like churches, union halls, clubs, and families of people that have moved away, with many left behind in red states because of industrial decline. Guns make suicide easy, and drugs and alcohol make self-medication and escape easy.

Americans have such empty lives that if they lose their job, they can't see any purpose for themselves. This is due to the inherent emptiness of our culture, and inability to recognize what life is about, despite the counter-cultural movements that revealed it, but were ignored and condemned in white middle red-state America. Like maybe doing some creative things: the arts, science, entreprenuership, new relationships or family, contributing to and helping others, going back to school, or moving to a blue state where culture and opportunity is greater. Unwillingness to take the financial risk of change because money is too tight. If your life is empty, and thus doesn't get you high or fulfilled on life, it's easier to take a drug or a drink to get a false and addictive high instead. Despair leads to self-destruction.

The economic stresses are caused by computer automation, free trade, and wage and salary decline due to concentration of income for the bosses; plus a failed education and cultural system, and poor social services and lack of investment in public infrastructure.

And of course, you can make the situation even much worse by taking out your frustration and despair on liberals and voting Republican, because you are brainwashed into one of their ideologies that hook you: blame the colored people, blame immigrants, blame PC and identity politics, blame women and feminism, blame non-Christians and lax morality, blame welfare recipients, blame taxes, blame gun control, and don't question the bosses, but look to them for salvation, because they are the "job creaters" and are not "dependent," or you can also fall for religious right nostrums and "make America great again!" or patriotic and militarist slogans. When your life is empty, you can't question authority or think critically and with imagination, and you are ripe fruit and easy pickins for a demagogue like Trump. The result is that there are no social services or income supports to help boost you and your community out of economic ruin and emotional despair. No, that would be dependency on big government, and I am too strong and self-reliant to do that. Oh pardon me, I need to get my fix......

America is sick, literally, and needs a great big change, and soon. Something to blast these people out of their deadly self-defeating patterns! There is a greater destiny for America, hidden in our history and our western and world culture, if only we can find it again. If only we can look past our despair and prejudice.

Eric you are looking at this through a 2T filter. RE: bold text.

If the average person loses their job, they lose the benefits that go with the job. Especially health care and dental. Plus others. They lose cash flow. If one is living paycheck to paycheck, that means immediate distress. Loss of purpose is the least of their worries.

Either there need to be enough jobs to employ those who are not knowledge workers, or, there needs to be universal income.

So far, Americans seem to be behaving more like Germany in the 1930s than America in the 1930s. The economically challenged are looking to fear and prejudice promoted by demagogues than to liberal social programs for answers to their plight. Is that because Americans today are more cultural and intellectually deprived than they were in the 1930s? They can't see the solutions; they only react to fear and prejudice.

Was Germany culturally and intellectually deprived leading up to the 1930s?  

Or was there a lot of culture, but much of the population was unresponsive, or hostile, to it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_culture

Either way, I guess it leads to the same thing.  But I disagree with you about the past 3 and 4 Ts being devoid of culture.

Yes, we disagree. The 3T in America was not "devoid" of culture, but often a tone of despair was evident. I think rap, punk, grunge and heavy metal are both ugly and negative in their message. It seems like it contributes to the mood of despair. I contrast them with an uplifting, melodious song from 1967 that came to my mind the other day. "Hey, 98.6 it's good to have you back again.... lovin' is the medicine that saved me...." The poor state of our TV contributes even more, perhaps. Violent and shallow. But disagree as we might about all that, I think it goes well beyond this. There is a low attitude toward education and the media in many segments of our culture, white and black and in between, young and old. Many people prefer to be uninformed. And most do not read books anymore. They may cruise and surf social media, but does that provide a suitable substitute? Philosophy and history, two of my favorite studies, are not so popular these days. There's the loneliness and social isolation I mentioned from the PBS report too. Our politics itself contributes too, of course. Negative, polarized, stalemated; it does not give much cause for hope from that quarter either. You don't see ads for heroin on TV, but lots of other drugs with lots of side effects are advertised to the hilt. And then there's the gun culture, of course. Makes suicide very handy.

Weimar culture was the outgrowth of turn of the 20th century culture, which was an epochal change of age in civilization. It guess it's no wonder that it took up where things left off since the 1890s-1910s era, which historians often agree was a turning point on a once in 500-year scale. And Europe had such a fertile foundation for vibrant culture to begin with going back thousands of years.

The article mentioned something of a resurgence of culture in Europe in the sixties. I guess the sixties in the United States did not have such an impact. 30 years later, the outgrowth of the sixties was limited to the new age and neo-pagan movements and other similar counter-cultural expressions like raves and multi-media computer arts. By the 3T, our culture had been already dumbed down to a remarkable degree. Concentration of media ownership was a major factor in this. Arguably, the anti-rational approach of the sixties itself contributed to a less vital intellectual life, along with the generally anti-intellectual, pragmatic, materialist mindset of America to begin with. So, there couldn't have been a 3T Weimar culture in the USA such as Germany had. The foundations just weren't there.

But the negative racist, nationalist currents of those times in Germany were hard to avoid, too. They had been building up for decades. Add the great depression, and they pushed the positive culture aside. Something like that has happened now in the USA, and perhaps in Europe too.

I have no info though about a mood of despair and shorter lifespans among Germans of middle age in the 1930s, such as we have in America today.

[Marypoza]

(02-23-2017, 06:20 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(02-23-2017, 12:02 PM)The Wonkette Wrote:

(02-22-2017, 08:17 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: 1. Here's what I find strange. What about planting a garden?   I think you can get quite a bang for the buck if seeds were allowed.  I know this firsthand.  Just today, I planted onions in my garden. It's that time in Oklahoma. Later, I'll plant some ghost peppers which are really, really nutritious.  Yeah, they're hot as hell, but that's what makes 'em so good. Capsaisin's an antioxidant and it literally burns fat away. I also wonder to no ends why wild edibles aren't mentioned. Dandelions are not weeds, but very nutritious salad greens. Yeah, I don't apply weed killer to my dandelions, but rather harvest them from the lawn and make salad from them. So, dude, you're correct, man does not live by bread alone. henbit is another green I use for salads.

I'm not sure what you mean by "if seeds are allowed".  Regarding food stamps (SNAP), you are allowed to purchase seeds.  https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/eligible-food-items.

1. Seeds:  That's nice, thanks.
2. Here's a puzzler. Papa Murphey's I think they're using the "not cooked" and "not consumed locally" clauses as loopholes. So...

I guess adding a clause "establishments which are restaurants are forbidden from accepting SNAP EBT cards" should work.

https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/...223880.htm

-- oh Christ that stuff is gross! Do not trust an lrishman with your pizza

[gabrielle]

(02-24-2017, 05:20 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Yes, we disagree. The 3T in America was not "devoid" of culture, but often a tone of despair was evident. I think rap, punk, grunge and heavy metal are both ugly and negative in their message. It seems like it contributes to the mood of despair. I contrast them with an uplifting, melodious song from 1967 that came to my mind the other day. "Hey, 98.6 it's good to have you back again.... lovin' is the medicine that saved me...." The poor state of our TV contributes even more, perhaps. Violent and shallow. But disagree as we might about all that, I think it goes well beyond this. There is a low attitude toward education and the media in many segments of our culture, white and black and in between, young and old. Many people prefer to be uninformed. And most do not read books anymore. They may cruise and surf social media, but does that provide a suitable substitute? Philosophy and history, two of my favorite studies, are not so popular these days. There's the loneliness and social isolation I mentioned from the PBS report too. Our politics itself contributes too, of course. Negative, polarized, stalemated; it does not give much cause for hope from that quarter either. You don't see ads for heroin on TV, but lots of other drugs with lots of side effects are advertised to the hilt. And then there's the gun culture, of course. Makes suicide very handy.

Weimar culture was the outgrowth of turn of the 20th century culture, which was an epochal change of age in civilization. It guess it's no wonder that it took up where things left off since the 1890s-1910s era, which historians often agree was a turning point on a once in 500-year scale. And Europe had such a fertile foundation for vibrant culture to begin with going back thousands of years.

The article mentioned something of a resurgence of culture in Europe in the sixties. I guess the sixties in the United States did not have such an impact. 30 years later, the outgrowth of the sixties was limited to the new age and neo-pagan movements and other similar counter-cultural expressions like raves and multi-media computer arts. By the 3T, our culture had been already dumbed down to a remarkable degree. Concentration of media ownership was a major factor in this. Arguably, the anti-rational approach of the sixties itself contributed to a less vital intellectual life, along with the generally anti-intellectual, pragmatic, materialist mindset of America to begin with. So, there couldn't have been a 3T Weimar culture in the USA such as Germany had. The foundations just weren't there.

But the negative racist, nationalist currents of those times in Germany were hard to avoid, too. They had been building up for decades. Add the great depression, and they pushed the positive culture aside. Something like that has happened now in the USA, and perhaps in Europe too.

I have no info though about a mood of despair and shorter lifespans among Germans of middle age in the 1930s, such as we have in America today.

Well, yeah...except that also in 1967 you had a song called "The End" where the guy screamed about killing his father and raping his mother.  The sixties weren't all sunshine and roses, not in reality nor in pop music.   And in 1991, the year of grunge and rap, there was a song, popular enough to reach #2 on the Billboard charts, that sang "Right here, right now--there is no other place I wanna be...watching the world wake up from history."   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwpjsToHzAE

Even rap and grunge could be very idealistic--more so than you give them credit for.  Kurt Cobain spoke against apathy in his generation, as did L7--"When we pretend that we're dead, they can't hear a word we've said."  [/url][url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTzhjjk9VoE]This song by Nas encourages youth to believe in themselves.  "During your life, never stop dreaming.  No one can take away your dreams." --Tupac Shakur.  

But I know, the music was "ugly," so it doesn't matter.  That is your personal opinion.  If your music was so much better why didn't it change the world?  Why did we have the malaise of the seventies, and Reaganism?  

The second bolded I agree with.  God, I don't want to see it, but I do.

[David Horn]

(02-24-2017, 12:34 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: ...  I never argued for or against the existence of "scammers", I pointed out that our existing social safety net has been evolving into something similar to what you have been proposing and the outcomes are not particularly good, as demonstrated by numerous articles linked to/posted in this thread.  This whole question of whether or not someone of those people "should" be on disability or what have you is beside the point.  The point is that they are, and that far from being a solution it seems to be part of the present problem, in the sense that it is not really improving their condition, not that they are "taking advantage" of the system.

OK -- not what I thought you were saying. Yes and no. There is a real issue here, but the issue has more to do with our view of ourselves than it does with the safety net, in whatever condition it may be. We've all been raised to be hyper-individualists, and that's not a good option going forward. It's easy to be a failure and full of self hate, if your goals are unachievable by any means. Anu Partanen has written about this extensively; here's a short example.

So this is an American problem, but the culture of Appalachia is particularly resistant to communalism. Hillbilly Elegy covers that pretty well. I don't see that changing, but, then again, it's not universal. Some will find a way out, and may be in the best position to help others. The adaptation gene will be the success gene for most of your generation and the next. I'm already out ... or on my way. For me, ,it's academic.

FWIW, no community has been better at adaptation than the Jewish diaspora, and it's well documented. A little light reading?

[pbrower2a]

(02-24-2017, 05:20 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The 3T in America was not "devoid" of culture, but often a tone of despair was evident. I think rap, punk, grunge and heavy metal are both ugly and negative in their message. It seems like it contributes to the mood of despair. I contrast them with an uplifting, melodious song from 1967 that came to my mind the other day. "Hey, 98.6 it's good to have you back again.... lovin' is the medicine that saved me...." The poor state of our TV contributes even more, perhaps. Violent and shallow. But disagree as we might about all that, I think it goes well beyond this. There is a low attitude toward education and the media in many segments of our culture, white and black and in between, young and old. Many people prefer to be uninformed. And most do not read books anymore. They may cruise and surf social media, but does that provide a suitable substitute? Philosophy and history, two of my favorite studies, are not so popular these days. There's the loneliness and social isolation I mentioned from the PBS report too. Our politics itself contributes too, of course. Negative, polarized, stalemated; it does not give much cause for hope from that quarter either. You don't see ads for heroin on TV, but lots of other drugs with lots of side effects are advertised to the hilt. And then there's the gun culture, of course. Makes suicide very handy.

We Americans are in part victims of our own success. We are productive enough that we could live at least as well as most Northern white people did in the 1950s (most blacks and Southern whites were not living the Good Life by 1950s standards, and that could be rectified with appropriate reforms and investments) with much less time on the job. If we are working more it is to ensure that rapacious plutocrats get even more, then maybe we need to question the foundations of the political choices that we have made. Maybe Donald Trump is everything wrong with America except for the drug scene.

America solved the problem of chronic underemployment in the 1930s by shortening the workweek. America was not out of the Crisis and would not be until Emperor Hirohito called for surrender in all but name, but by the late 1930s things were materially better for most Americans than they had been ten years earlier.

We have a sick culture, a culture so sick that it could elect Donald Trump and give him Congressional majorities willing to do his bidding and give some public officials the empowerment to call for fascistic repression of dissent. People who say that it would be almost acceptable to run over political protesters who challenge the moral credibility of rapacious plutocrats and the supposed rectitude of the Great and Infallible Leader of America who has decided for all time what the truth is? They have imbibed of the same mass culture as the rest of us. If they are Boomers they may be just as reflective as Blue Boomers; those cruel people reflect upon the wrong bases of political, cultural, and economic leadership.

...Soon after the abject defeat of the Third Reich Americans got to judge Nazis for their worst crimes.  The harshest interrogators and judges were, not surprisingly, Jews who had scores to settle. After all, many of those bodies stacked like cordwood  at the end of the war, the corpses in mass graves, and the ashes that had gone up chimneys at extermination camps had had Jewish souls attached. Second-worst as interrogators and judges to Nazis on trial for their lives were those Americans who had extensive study of German history and culture. They admired the Germany of Goethe, Schiller, Bach, and Beethoven and had no use for someone who could say as Sergeant Otto Moll (executed as a war criminal) said when casting pellets of cyanide into the gas chamber, Na gib ihnen etwas zu fressen. (now give them something to gobble)*. It was not Goethe, Schiller, Bach, or Beethoven who induced Nazis to abuse, dispossess, beat, and murder the Jews; those Germanophiles by culture could hate Nazis who abandoned the benign part of the German cultural heritage.

...After World War II, both parts of Germany repudiated Nazism as a cultural influence. The capitalist West and the Communist East found different pretexts for rejecting Nazism -- liberalism in the West, Marxism-Leninism in the East. Neither cast off the true glories of German culture before Hitler. Both even accepted Marx as part of the heritage, if with vastly-different interpretations and emphasis.

When Donald Trump is off the political scene we Americans will need to reject the patterns of thought that made possible the rise of a demagogue who, like Hitler, achieved great power with less-than-majority (in Trump's case, less even than plurality support) by appealing to the worst in human nature. We will have to go beyond the technical basics of reading, writing, arithmetic, and technical training to include at the least philosophy so that people can make decisions on the viability of political promises based upon formal logic, philosophy so that we can be savvy enough to recognize and reject psychological manipulation when we encounter it, and economics so that we know that the only really good deal is something good for both. Most significantly, less time spend in formal employment implies that we will have more leisure time. Many Americans have no idea of how they can use it to enrich their lives. How about art, music, literature, and outdoor activity?

Most of us have all the stuff that we need. Newly-poor people may have large collections of books, music, and video that they really can't sell for much.

Quote:Weimar culture was the outgrowth of turn of the 20th century culture, which was an epochal change of age in civilization. It guess it's no wonder that it took up where things left off since the 1890s-1910s era, which historians often agree was a turning point on a once in 500-year scale. And Europe had such a fertile foundation for vibrant culture to begin with going back thousands of years.

Oh, Art Deco! Oh, Impressionism! Oh, Cubism! Oh, great authors of the time like Thomas Mann and the ones like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky coming into the mainstream of literature! Just think of the great composers born from about 1866 on -- Janacek, Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Sibelius, Scriabin, Glazunov, Vaughan-Williams, Respighi, Ives, Ravel, Albeniz, Respighi, Schoenberg, Bartok, Stravinsky, Honegger, Prokofiev, Gershwin, Orff, Copland... and what glorious silent movies in Hollywood and (for a short time) Berlin!

But the Germans would throw most of that away, human as it was, as "Degeneracy". They would accept this:



It looks stupid now, but it didn't seem so ludicrous in 1935.

Quote:The article mentioned something of a resurgence of culture in Europe in the sixties. I guess the sixties in the United States did not have such an impact. 30 years later, the outgrowth of the sixties was limited to the new age and neo-pagan movements and other similar counter-cultural expressions like raves and multi-media computer arts. By the 3T, our culture had been already dumbed down to a remarkable degree. Concentration of media ownership was a major factor in this. Arguably, the anti-rational approach of the sixties itself contributed to a less vital intellectual life, along with the generally anti-intellectual, pragmatic, materialist mindset of America to begin with. So, there couldn't have been a 3T Weimar culture in the USA such as Germany had. The foundations just weren't there.

As Henry Louis Mencken cynically observed, nobody can go broke by underestimating the taste of the American people. By the late 1970s the younger teenagers (Generation X) tired of being preached to in the popular culture and wanted some fun at best and angry cynicism at the worst. "Sid Vicious", anyone?

Of course the concentration in media allowed shareholders to define profit as the only measure of merit. To be sure, the Vietnam War made its participants distrustful of government, but those affected were Boomers and not X. Maybe what will stop America from going full-bore fascist is that Generation X 'missed out' on the meat-grinder war and vindictive settlement that the German contemporaries of the American Lost Generation endured, and the hyperinflation that caused people to distrust even money.

Quote:But the negative racist, nationalist currents of those times in Germany were hard to avoid, too.  They had been building up for decades. Add the great depression, and they pushed the positive culture aside. Something like that has happened now in the USA, and perhaps in Europe too.

I have no info though about a mood of despair and shorter lifespans among Germans of middle age in the 1930s, such as we have in America today.

"Germany" as a concept was an awkward, novel idea even during the First World War. Germany was less than a half-century old throughout the war. Wilhelmine Germany was an oddity as a federal monarchy as a federation of kingdoms nominally independent with (until Wilhelm II took nearly-autocratic power) a multi-party democracy. But... Donald Trump has remarkable parallels to Wilhelm II in behavior.He has debased American democracy badly, not that he didn't have accomplices.

*Germans give a distinction between essen, which refers to eating in an orderly way as people do, and fressen, which means to eat as an animal does. To use the verb fressen to describe a person eating is an extreme insult.

[SomeGuy]

Quote:OK -- not what I thought you were saying.

Yes, you saw "disability claims", stopped reading, and immediately went with a pre-programmed response.  More or less as I suspected.  Bad Dave!

Quote:Yes and no. There is a real issue here, but the issue has more to do with our view of ourselves than it does with the safety net, in whatever condition it may be. We've all been raised to be hyper-individualists, and that's not a good option going forward. It's easy to be a failure and full of self hate, if your goals are unachievable by any means. Anu Partanen has written about this extensively; here's a short example. 

So this is an American problem, but the culture of Appalachia is particularly resistant to communalism. Hillbilly Elegy covers that pretty well. I don't see that changing, but, then again, it's not universal. Some will find a way out, and may be in the best position to help others. The adaptation gene will be the success gene for most of your generation and the next. I'm already out ... or on my way. For me, ,it's academic.

FWIW, no community has been better at adaptation than the Jewish diaspora, and it's well documented. A little light reading?

Yes, yes, Jews and Scandinavia good, rednecks bad.  The limited range of responses you people are capable of (as demonstrated previously with the disability thing) is always funny, when it isn't very tedious.

You link to an article discussing things like family leave and healthcare as discussed by some Finnish lady living in NYC.  What the hell would that have to do with the issue we were discussing of permanent unemployment and what it does to people?  Access to government healthcare is how those people are getting opiates in the first place.  What different does employer family leave make to people who are unemployed?

Please explain to me what the Jewish diaspora (presumably the historical one) has to do with said issue.  You do realize I pointed out that this phenomenon is a bit more widespread than just modern Appalachia, right?

Are you actually capable of independent thought, and discussing an issue rationally in its own right, or do you just have a limited range of responses provided to you by your betters that you trot out in response to particular keywords?

[Eric the Green]

(02-26-2017, 01:30 AM)gabrielle Wrote:

(02-24-2017, 05:20 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Yes, we disagree. The 3T in America was not "devoid" of culture, but often a tone of despair was evident. I think rap, punk, grunge and heavy metal are both ugly and negative in their message. It seems like it contributes to the mood of despair. I contrast them with an uplifting, melodious song from 1967 that came to my mind the other day. "Hey, 98.6 it's good to have you back again.... lovin' is the medicine that saved me...." The poor state of our TV contributes even more, perhaps. Violent and shallow. But disagree as we might about all that, I think it goes well beyond this. There is a low attitude toward education and the media in many segments of our culture, white and black and in between, young and old. Many people prefer to be uninformed. And most do not read books anymore. They may cruise and surf social media, but does that provide a suitable substitute? Philosophy and history, two of my favorite studies, are not so popular these days. There's the loneliness and social isolation I mentioned from the PBS report too. Our politics itself contributes too, of course. Negative, polarized, stalemated; it does not give much cause for hope from that quarter either. You don't see ads for heroin on TV, but lots of other drugs with lots of side effects are advertised to the hilt. And then there's the gun culture, of course. Makes suicide very handy.

Weimar culture was the outgrowth of turn of the 20th century culture, which was an epochal change of age in civilization. It guess it's no wonder that it took up where things left off since the 1890s-1910s era, which historians often agree was a turning point on a once in 500-year scale. And Europe had such a fertile foundation for vibrant culture to begin with going back thousands of years.

The article mentioned something of a resurgence of culture in Europe in the sixties. I guess the sixties in the United States did not have such an impact. 30 years later, the outgrowth of the sixties was limited to the new age and neo-pagan movements and other similar counter-cultural expressions like raves and multi-media computer arts. By the 3T, our culture had been already dumbed down to a remarkable degree. Concentration of media ownership was a major factor in this. Arguably, the anti-rational approach of the sixties itself contributed to a less vital intellectual life, along with the generally anti-intellectual, pragmatic, materialist mindset of America to begin with. So, there couldn't have been a 3T Weimar culture in the USA such as Germany had. The foundations just weren't there.

But the negative racist, nationalist currents of those times in Germany were hard to avoid, too. They had been building up for decades. Add the great depression, and they pushed the positive culture aside. Something like that has happened now in the USA, and perhaps in Europe too.

I have no info though about a mood of despair and shorter lifespans among Germans of middle age in the 1930s, such as we have in America today.

Well, yeah...except that also in 1967 you had a song called "The End" where the guy screamed about killing his father and raping his mother.  The sixties weren't all sunshine and roses, not in reality nor in pop music.   And in 1991, the year of grunge and rap, there was a song, popular enough to reach #2 on the Billboard charts, that sang "Right here, right now--there is no other place I wanna be...watching the world wake up from history."   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwpjsToHzAE

I actually have a copy of "The End," (because I bought The Doors album), and I don't have one of "98.6." Irony I guess. The difference is in the music; When I think back on the music of the sixties, I remember so many that lifted my spirit. "The End" attracted me because of the smooth, flowing ambient sound in it that was pioneering. When I listen to 3T era songs, I don't get that uplift from it. But I like getting ideas of music from all the different times to check out, so I'm listening. Interestingly, a 4T song called "there's no place I'd rather be" is being used now in a ubiquitous Bay Area casino ad. It's pretty good; I already posted it in the 4T music thread here. "Right Here Right Now" has its good points. It's OK, but it's not easy to compare it to the music I really like. But my point, is the overwhelming trends that can't realistically be denied in 3T music; and it is as I said.

Quote:Even rap and grunge could be very idealistic--more so than you give them credit for.  Kurt Cobain spoke against apathy in his generation, as did L7--"When we pretend that we're dead, they can't hear a word we've said."  [/url][url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTzhjjk9VoE]This song by Nas encourages youth to believe in themselves.  "During your life, never stop dreaming.  No one can take away your dreams." --Tupac Shakur.  

But I know, the music was "ugly," so it doesn't matter.  That is your personal opinion.  If your music was so much better why didn't it change the world?  Why did we have the malaise of the seventies, and Reaganism?  

That's right; it's ugly. Not all of it, but when it is, that makes it a downer. The music has to match the words, or it's a mixed message. And ugliness is obvious, even if people deny it. But it's very easy to see that, these days, obvious facts are being denied all the time. It's the times we live in; times of denial. The 60s music did change the world. But then the sixties ended, and the music went away. It's not easy for music to change the world. It kind of changed together. Corporate concentrated media, cynicism, Reaganism, cynical pop music; kind of all arrived together.

Quote:The second bolded I agree with.  God, I don't want to see it, but I do.

And the denial of reality is behind it.

[Eric the Green]

(02-26-2017, 09:18 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: America solved the problem of chronic underemployment in the 1930s by shortening the workweek. America was not out of the Crisis and would not be until Emperor Hirohito called for surrender in all but name, but by the late 1930s things were materially better for most Americans than they had been ten years earlier.

Indeed, now the need is to further shorten the work week; it's one of the answers to the worker surplus. The ideology that people should be required to work more than they do in other countries is contributing to unemployment and lower participation in the USA workforce at a time when fewer workers are needed. And this means; shorter hours for the same pay. Make the CEOs cough up the dough instead of hogging it. I understand this might not work for small business owners though. But every available worker deserves a job at a living wage, or else income support if there are not enough jobs.

Quote:"Germany" as a concept was an awkward, novel idea even during the First World War. Germany was less than a half-century old throughout the war. Wilhelmine Germany was an oddity as a federal monarchy as a federation of kingdoms nominally independent with (until Wilhelm II took nearly-autocratic power) a multi-party democracy. But... Donald Trump has remarkable parallels to Wilhelm II in behavior.He has debased American democracy badly, not that he didn't have accomplices.

Many have noticed that although Wilhelm II might have a "soul family" parallel resemblance to The Donald, Mussolini may be the direct reincarnation connection.

http://www.eurasiareview.com/24072016-do...lini-oped/

[gabrielle]

(02-26-2017, 07:15 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I actually have a copy of "The End," (because I bought The Doors album), and I don't have one of "98.6." Irony I guess. The difference is in the music; When I think back on the music of the sixties, I remember so many that lifted my spirit. "The End" attracted me because of the smooth, flowing ambient sound in it that was pioneering. When I listen to 3T era songs, I don't get that uplift from it. But I like getting ideas of music from all the different times to check out, so I'm listening. Interestingly, a 4T song called "there's no place I'd rather be" is being used now in a ubiquitous Bay Area casino ad. It's pretty good; I already posted it in the 4T music thread here. "Right Here Right Now" has its good points. It's OK, but it's not easy to compare it to the music I really like. But my point, is the overwhelming trends that can't realistically be denied in 3T music; and it is as I said.

The hypnotic flow of "The End" is indeed lulling and pleasant.  A fog and haze obscures reality, impairing one's ability to perceive the "danger on the highway," leading inexorably on to death and destruction.  My point is not that it isn't a great song, but that it is a very dark one, and "negative in its message."  

Quote:That's right; it's ugly. Not all of it, but when it is, that makes it a downer. The music has to match the words, or it's a mixed message. And ugliness is obvious, even if people deny it. But it's very easy to see that, these days, obvious facts are being denied all the time. It's the times we live in; times of denial. The 60s music did change the world. But then the sixties ended, and the music went away. It's not easy for music to change the world. It kind of changed together. Corporate concentrated media, cynicism, Reaganism, cynical pop music; kind of all arrived together.

Please do not equate personal opinions on pop music to "fact denial."  There is a difference between stating a belief that one song is better than another and stating that a massacre happened in Bowling Green, KY when it didn't.  If you can't tell the difference, then you might be a victim of the 60s "anti-rationalism" you alluded to earlier in this thread.

[SomeGuy]

Blah, blah, blah...

Getting back to the topic of the thread for a second, here is an interesting article on the impact of manufacturing losses on marriage and fertility rates.

Quote:When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage-Market Value of Men
David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson
February 2017
Abstract
The structure of marriage and child-rearing in U.S. households has undergone two marked shifts in the last three decades: a steep decline in the prevalence of marriage among young adults, and a sharp rise in the fraction of children born to unmarried mothers or living in single-headed households. A potential contributor to both phenomena is the declining labor-market opportunities faced by males, which make them less valuable as marital partners. We exploit large scale, plausibly exogenous labor-demand shocks stemming from rising international manufacturing competition to test how shifts in the supply of young ‘marriageable’ males affect marriage, fertility and children’s living circumstances. Trade shocks to manufacturing industries have particularly negative impacts on the labor market prospects of men and degrade their marriage market value along multiple dimensions: diminishing their relative earnings—particularly at the lower segment of the distribution—reducing their physical availability in trade-impacted labor markets, and increasing their participation in risky and damaging behaviors. As predicted by a simple model of marital decision-making under uncertainty, we document that adverse shocks to the supply of ‘marriageable’ men reduce the prevalence of marriage and lower fertility but raise the fraction of children born to young and unwed mothers and living in in poor single-parent households. The falling marriage-market value of young men appears to be a quantitatively important contributor to the rising rate of out-of-wedlock childbearing and single-headed childrearing in the United States. …

[Eric the Green]

(02-27-2017, 09:40 AM)gabrielle Wrote:

(02-26-2017, 07:15 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I actually have a copy of "The End," (because I bought The Doors album), and I don't have one of "98.6." Irony I guess. The difference is in the music; When I think back on the music of the sixties, I remember so many that lifted my spirit. "The End" attracted me because of the smooth, flowing ambient sound in it that was pioneering. When I listen to 3T era songs, I don't get that uplift from it. But I like getting ideas of music from all the different times to check out, so I'm listening. Interestingly, a 4T song called "there's no place I'd rather be" is being used now in a ubiquitous Bay Area casino ad. It's pretty good; I already posted it in the 4T music thread here. "Right Here Right Now" has its good points. It's OK, but it's not easy to compare it to the music I really like. But my point, is the overwhelming trends that can't realistically be denied in 3T music; and it is as I said.

The hypnotic flow of "The End" is indeed lulling and pleasant.  A fog and haze obscures reality, impairing one's ability to perceive the "danger on the highway," leading inexorably on to death and destruction.  My point is not that it isn't a great song, but that it is a very dark one, and "negative in its message."  

Quote:That's right; it's ugly. Not all of it, but when it is, that makes it a downer. The music has to match the words, or it's a mixed message. And ugliness is obvious, even if people deny it. But it's very easy to see that, these days, obvious facts are being denied all the time. It's the times we live in; times of denial. The 60s music did change the world. But then the sixties ended, and the music went away. It's not easy for music to change the world. It kind of changed together. Corporate concentrated media, cynicism, Reaganism, cynical pop music; kind of all arrived together.

Please do not equate personal opinions on pop music to "fact denial."  There is a difference between stating a belief that one song is better than another and stating that a massacre happened in Bowling Green, KY when it didn't.  If you can't tell the difference, then you might be a victim of the 60s "anti-rationalism" you alluded to earlier in this thread.

Maybe "reality denial" is better, eh?

The difference is obvious.

My "opinion" extends to more than one song or another. The general trend of pop music along with much else in the 3T was cynical, negative and ugly. Exceptions apply. You know my opinion.

I don't know yet if the 4T will be better, but it seemed to be getting better for a while. Now things may just have reverted. But the recent "Rather Be" song was positive, and the violin work on it was very fine. And I was so happy for "Happy."

[SomeGuy]

Gabrielle,

You're talking to an old man with a Justin Bieber fetish and a thing for astrology; I don't think reason is the best strategy.  Try a rolled up newspaper instead. 

[Eric the Green]

(02-27-2017, 03:51 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Gabrielle,

You're talking to an old man with a Justin Bieber fetish and a thing for astrology; I don't think reason is the best strategy.  Try a rolled up newspaper instead. 

I'm allowed to have my opinions too, boy. I've gotten my share of those newspapers here already. More won't change a thing.

You brought up Justin Bieber; shame on you!

Just enjoy the song in my siggie and stop calling such a great song "a fetish." Again, there's really no denying it, although many people do deny it.