Rising suicide rates amongst veterans,
According to an Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America report, veteran suicides continue to rise. In March 2012, 28 soldiers reportedly took their own lives. The month before 15 suicides were reported, according to the U.S. Army. In 2011, the Veterans Affairs Department reported an average of 950 suicide attempts each month in 2009. Seven percent of those attempts were successful while 11 percent of those who didn't succeed the first time tried again in nine months.
According to an Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America report, veteran suicides continue to rise. In March 2012, 28 soldiers reportedly took their own lives. The month before 15 suicides were reported, according to the U.S. Army.
In 2011, the Veterans Affairs Department reported an average of 950 suicide attempts each month in 2009. Seven percent of those attempts were successful while 11 percent of those who didn't succeed the first time tried again in nine months.
@Bert: Those numbers are just astounding. That's almost one soldier every day. Most sickening is that the articles discussing the matter all suggesting "increased mental health support" instead of considering the possibility that the problem is the war and killing itself - what it is we're asking these soldiers to do while over there.
I would like to see a study that compares the suicide rate between soldiers that have seen front-lines combat and soldiers that have not. I'm willing to bet money that most of the suicides are in the former category and that the suicide rate in the latter category is not significantly higher than the population average. "Deployment" or "active duty" are rather empty terms, simply being geographically located anywhere in or near and in support of Iraq is called "deployed to Iraq."
Clayton -
Wow. That is a great video- thanks for posting it, John James. Congratulations on recently becoming a top 10 contributor as well.
If I had a cake and ate it, it can be concluded that I do not have it anymore. HHH
Has anyone read Garrison's "Time and Money"? If so what did they think of it?
The Anarch is to the Anarchist what the Monarch is to the Monarchist. -Ernst Jünger
ThatOldGuy:Wow. That is a great video- thanks for posting it, John James.
Congratulations on recently becoming a top 10 contributor as well.
What makes a top 10? You mean like, post count?
I actually just came across this book the other day- I've never heard of it! I absolutely enjoyed Garrison's graphical representation of ABCT in his Diagrammatical Exposition, especially comparing it to the Keynesian representation of the Business Cycle and exposing the various fallacies.
I'm very interested in purchasing Time and Money and reading it.
John James:What makes a top 10? You mean like, post count?
I don't know what makes a top 10 or how contribution is "measured" on this forum- I would be interested if anyone did know. I just noticed the green bar under your avatar is fully green- until recently there was one white bar all the way to the right of the bar.
"For reasons unknown" talking about the green bar in this manner reminds me of the aliens in Toy Story and The Claw. "The Green Bar ... The Green Bar decides who contributes and who does not."
lol. I hadn't even noticed that, but that's hilarious.
Reality Check: U.S. Will Stay In Afghanistan 10 Years After the Troops Are Supposed To Come Home?
(FOX19) - For some time the U.S. has been scheduled to draw down troops in Afghanistan by the year 2014. Most Americans have come to believe that means U.S. involvement in the country will be over at that time. But not so according to a new agreement reached by the U.S. and Afghani governments. In fact, according to that agreement, the U.S. will remain in Afghanistan at least 10 years after the war is supposed to be over.
(FOX19) -
For some time the U.S. has been scheduled to draw down troops in Afghanistan by the year 2014. Most Americans have come to believe that means U.S. involvement in the country will be over at that time. But not so according to a new agreement reached by the U.S. and Afghani governments. In fact, according to that agreement, the U.S. will remain in Afghanistan at least 10 years after the war is supposed to be over.
Ben's got a YouTube channel now:
John James:Ben's got a YouTube channel now:
what what
FOX News Admits Ron Paul Could Win 5 States
Yay for police brutality!
I figure this belongs here.
Let's imagine two companies, Acme and Bozhead. They make the same product. Acme arranges the pay, breaks etc. to maximize employee happiness and productivity. Bozhead is run by a-holes. 1. Wouldn't the best employees gravitate toward Acme? 2. Wouldn't that leave Bozhead staffed mostly by losers? 3. Wouldn't Acme's happier smarter more productive employees be able to produce more product at a lower price than the grumpy Bozhead losers? 4. Wouldn't Acme succeed and Bozhead fail? So why do we see so many Bozhead companies? There must be something interfering with the natural, necessary process that allows Bozheads to fail. A. Bailouts (taxpayer funded). B. Gargantuan bewildering regulations (enforcement taxpayer funded) that present a huge barrier to entry, ensuring that once Bozhead gets a foothold in a particular market, Acme can never come along and challenge them. C. "Intellectual property" laws (enforcement taxpayer funded) that ensure no two companies can sell the same product, thereby eliminating competition and preserving a-hole companies. Can anyone start to see a theme here?
Edit: The follow-up comments are pretty interesting IMO. Here's another gem.
The keyboard is mightier than the gun.
Non parit potestas ipsius auctoritatem.
Voluntaryism Forum
Rural kids, parents angry about Labor Dept. rule banning farm chores
I still can't get over that Greenpeace indoctrination piece The Story of Stuff. Those lying bastards! They actually claimed that people in the third world have to move to the cities to be exploited in factories because evil industrialization poisoned their happy rural villages. Right, rural poverty was great until evil capitalism came in and ruined it all with pollution. As if every spot of countryside in the third world was poisoned by industrialization in the last few decades. How exactly are factories in coastal China poisoning central China, eh? People are moving towards the polluted cities, not away from them. And Greenpeace knows this. But they word it in a careful way as to imply stuff that they know is factually wrong, to deliberately deceive children.
EmperorNero:I still can't get over that Greenpeace indoctrination piece The Story of Stuff. Those lying bastards!
a) It's technically not a Greenpeace project. Annie Leonard just used to work for Greenpeace.
b) you've seen Lee Doren's critique, right? That should make you feel at least a little better.
ThatOldGuy is unsure as to whether he should tell EmperorNero that Annie Leonard has more "The Story of ..." videos in which she blatantly lies -or is, at least, very ignorant- to the audience.
If he looks at the link I provided he'll find out. But it'll be in the form of critiques, so I think it'll be okay.
6 reasons it's the Year of Big Money in politics
I'm not that powerful, Rupert Murdoch tells judge
Gingrich to end presidential campaign next week
My Speech Delivered at the New York Federal Reserve Bank
Crime boasting for profit
The most cruel thing anyone could do to Annie Leonard would be to teach her basic economics. Then she would have to live with the shame of having fabricated that nonsense for the rest of her life. I think I'm gonna hire a guy who just follows her around, shouting the first chapter of Basic Economics at her over and over again.
EmperorNero:I think I'm gonna hire a guy who just follows her around, shouting the first chapter of Basic Economics at her over and over again.
Tell me no one else thought of this as they read that...
skylien: 2 great essays about ABCT I recently read:: DOES AUSTRIAN BUSINESS CYCLE THEORY HELP EXPLAIN THE DOT-COM BOOM AND BUST? by GENE CALLAHAN and ROGER W. GARRISON The Role of Ideal Types in Austrian Business Cycle Theory by Gene Callahan and Steve Horwitz
2 great essays about ABCT I recently read::
I was reading the Callahan and Garrison one and came across this strange part:
Y2K Liquidity and the Final Charge of the Bulls The stock market, especially the high technology NASDAQ, seemed to levitate as Y2K liquidity hit the market in late 1999 and early 2000. The NASDAQ Composite index moved from 2746 at the end of September 1999 to 5048 on March 10, 2000, an 83 percent rise in under six months! During this period, the Federal Reserve’s target interest rates, which were rising, obscured the fact that the central bank was easing in anticipation of a possible Y2K liquidity crisis: During the final quarter of the year, the Fed pumped sufficient liquidity into the banking system to bring down the Federal Funds Rate from 5.5 per cent to below 4 per cent—the widest deviation from its target rate in over nine years —and thereby paved the way for the last frantic, record-shattering upward lunge in the equity markets, which took place in the first quarter of 2000. Bank loans thus raced ahead at a 19.4 per cent annual pace during the fourth quarter of 1999, the highest in at least fifteen years. . . . Simultaneously, the growth of the money supply vaulted to 14.3 per cent, even faster than in the wake of the Fed’s moves to calm the crisis of the previous autumn. (Brenner 2002, pp. 180–81)
I checked this out here:
http://www.econstats.com/r/rusa_ew1.htm
And that assertion seems to be completely false. There wasn't a time when fed funds or discount went from 5.5 to 4 until after the crash. Am I missing something here?
This is something that might actually reach everyday neo-cons and progressives...
(yes, it's extremely obvious the guy is telling the truth and actually is an accountant, but still...
The only problem is he doesn't bring up how the shortfall cannot be recouped by "soaking the rich." So you might include this one as a companion video:
Hah! They finally realized they had that loophole left and they decided to make lives for those families even worse. Come on now. Seriously?
In fact, I have gone to buy raw milk from PA before and the family from which we buy has one of their kids helping them carry the stuff. I am assuming that they will then have to either directly hire a new worker or drawn time from other workers to do this job and then hire a different worker to compensate for the lost productivity.
Sad that they think they're helping the families and children.
Are the Fed's only mechanisms for influencing monetary policy the discount window and purchasing government assets from banks? Or are those just its main ones (meaning there are ancillary measures)? The dot-com bubble kind of has me stumped because the discount window rates were pretty well camped out from 5-6% throughout the late 90's. Is M2 a pretty good way to gauge the Fed's asset purchasing?
My goodness. It would be so much better if security were left to the free market. Just wow.
I am not kidding.
Jargon: I checked this out here: http://www.econstats.com/r/rusa_ew1.htm And that assertion seems to be completely false. There wasn't a time when fed funds or discount went from 5.5 to 4 until after the crash. Am I missing something here?
If you look at the link you gave me, then you have the date as first column, the fund target rates 2nd and 3rd and the actual fund rate is the 5th column. Now if you compare the target rate with the actual rate then there is the interesting bit that although the target rates were consecutively raised from the end of 1998 all the way to the end of 2000, the actual fund rate stopped increasing on 17th of December 1999 and even fell under 5%! This only can happen if the FED at this time didn’t really target their target. Also the FEDs funds rate was already as low as 3% in the early 90s.
The only thing that confuses me is that they write “below 4 percent” in the paper, which I would interpret as “3.something”, although it was just under 5%. Maybe this was a typing error.. This still is over half a percentage point off their target, which is quite a lot for my taste.
The second point is regarding the actual level of the discount/fund rate. I hope it is ok to address this here although you asked me separately about this.
You said:
Jargon: I checked out the discount rates throughout the 90's and they didn't really seem conducive to starting a bubble. They didn't even go below 5% until 1999, and Robert Brenner makes some claims to the contrary.
I checked out the discount rates throughout the 90's and they didn't really seem conducive to starting a bubble. They didn't even go below 5% until 1999, and Robert Brenner makes some claims to the contrary.
First it is not about the discount rate, the more important rate is the FEDs Fund rate. And the fund rate of 5% only seems high from the point of view of today. If you compare it to the 80s it appears to be quite low. Also as already said above the FEDs target was in the early 90s already as low as 3%. The problem really is that it is quite hard to find out if the FEDs fund rate is too low or not. It can be even too low at 10%, or theoretically it is even possible that it is too high at 1%. Of course the possibility that it is too high decreases the lower it is, but why Austrians generally assume that the FEDs fund rate is kept too low by the FED comes from the understanding of how the FED actual works and to what their actual leading figures are committed to, which generally is to be openly biased towards “low” interest rates.
I know this is of course quite unsatisfying if you want to try to convince someone else that the FED kept rates too low in the 90s, since this notion doesn’t really come out of empirical but rather from theoretical conclusions, which means that the person you want to convince already has to agree on the theory with you... Only if the rate is at approx. 1% or lower people will quite surely generally accept the claim that the FEDs fund rate is (too) low.
@JJ. I could only get a minute into. Once i saw Obama come out and read some of the comments (pro-Obama) i left. I go on the internet to escape from that.
ThatOldGuy: ThatOldGuy is unsure as to whether he should tell EmperorNero that Annie Leonard has more "The Story of ..." videos in which she blatantly lies -or is, at least, very ignorant- to the audience.
The Story of being an ignorant eugenicist twat who is complicit in causing the misery of millions?
RE: Obama slow jam video
What a ******* circus.
Swiss woman dies after attempting to live on sunlight; Woman gave up food and water on spiritual journey
Thought you guys could use a good laugh. From the comments:
She's lucky she wasn't from the US. The local SWAT team would've shot her to keep her from killing herself. LibertyHQ and its awesome forum. | Post Points: 35
She's lucky she wasn't from the US. The local SWAT team would've shot her to keep her from killing herself.
This has likely been posted before, but I'd like to post it again:
Notice how they laugh, laugh at Schiff!
Swiss woman dies after attempting to live on sunlight; Woman gave up food and water on spiritual journey Thought you guys could use a good laugh. From the comments: She's lucky she wasn't from the US. The local SWAT team would've shot her to keep her from killing herself. No, the gov. would have caged her for trying to live off-the-grid. | Post Points: 20
She's lucky she wasn't from the US. The local SWAT team would've shot her to keep her from killing herself. No, the gov. would have caged her for trying to live off-the-grid. | Post Points: 20
EmperorNero:The Story of being an ignorant eugenicist twat who is complicit in causing the misery of millions?
Yeah that one! It's a sad story ...
I can't believe the awful treatment of F4M in this thread and the ignorance of those who treat him like crap. Have you never heard of Henry David Thoreau? Or the Earthship projects that governments tried to stop at every turn because, yes, they would be able to live completely self sustained?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_Warrior_(film)
Strange opinion, Porco Rosso. You see, Thoreau did not despise civilization and call for everyone to become a hunter-gatherer. I'll even quote from wikipedia for you:
Thoreau neither rejected civilization nor fully embraced wilderness. Instead he sought a middle ground, the pastoral realm that integrates both nature and culture...In the essay "Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher" Roderick Nash writes: "Thoreau left Concord in 1846 for the first of three trips to northern Maine. His expectations were high because he hoped to find genuine, primeval America. But contact with real wilderness in Maine affected him far differently than had the idea of wilderness in Concord. Instead of coming out of the woods with a deepened appreciation of the wilds, Thoreau felt a greater respect for civilization and realized the necessity of balance."
So, what was this about ignorance?