The best thing for America is about 10 more years of Republican rule...

[kentuck]

By then, everyone will have heard of John Crapper. Because America will be in the proverbial crapper. They will have no one else to blame. America will be on life support and nobody will believe them when they try to blame it on Bill Clinton. Their "tax-cuts" and supply-side bullshit will have been totally discredited. America will be compared to other 3rd world nations.

Our military will be in disarray, but much like present-day Russia, we will have many, many dangerous nukes, some not accounted for. We will be in our 2nd Great Depression. Gasoline will be rationed because we will no longer be able to control other countries economies, such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, like we did in the good ol' days. There will be few jobs because most of them went elsewhere.

Because of the huge debt, the dollar will be devalued to where it might take 10 dollars to buy what one will buy nowadays. In an effort to appease the working class, the minimum wage will be raised to $12 an hour but in actuality, it will be less in real terms than the minimum wage of today. People will live in gangs and communes, in efforts to survive in the new America.

More people will own guns and there will be more violence in America. People will dream of the good ol days, when Herbert Hoover was president. At least they had apples and pencils. Back yards will be turned into vegetable gardens. In many ways, it will look like the 1930's. The working class will be the new slaves.

..and I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken....

[FranzFerdinand]

1. i saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children...

it's a hard...

[classof56]

4. Hard rain's a-gonna fall!

And as it says in the Bible--it will fall on the just and the unjust.

People, get ready!

Tired Old Cynic

[ComerPerro]

2. That's the only way some people will wake up

And there will still be the 20% who are just fanatics that blindly follow Republican lies and bullshit.

[Old and In the Way]

3. A hard rain is going to fall...............

Apparently, we haven't suffered enough yet. But your point is well taken....the standard of living is starting the long slide down. What 50% of the population doesn't realize is that Dimson was precisely the wrong man for times. Eventually, they will come to their sense.

[titoresque]

5. True, unless

we get nuked first by China or Russia...or god knows who else. Or...we nuke ourselves.....oops I mean "another terra-ist attack"

I'm fairly young, in my thirties......is it just me or have you EVER in your life time seen things progress this fast toward total destruction?!

[FloridaPat]

6. I've gone through a lot the last 50 years, but this is the first time in

my life I have no hope, am scared -really scared - and see the government as a real enemy with no where to run inside our borders. And the way * is running things, there may be no way out of here when the dollar drops to 10 cents to the Euro.

[titoresque]

11. yep!

this is a scary one....

[philarq]

15. wow---amazing graph

[Al-CIAda]

21. That is what is so different IMO. Our own gov't. is the thing to fear.

These bastards actually do harm and with intention to their own people.
Madness.

[EST]

10. This is the first time for the death-loving crazies to be this

powerful. If we should survive this, it will probably come at the expense of even more oppression. There will have to be a total banishment of the crazies. Back to whatever hell hole they sprang from.
If the moderate Christians and moderates of other faiths can help us, it may be a little quicker.

[wli]

7. you're far too optimistic

Bushler is rather likely to do things Auschwitz-style.

[kentuck]

8. Yes..I've always been an optimist...

:shrug:

[movonne]

9. What do you mean 10 years...the next 3 will do it...

[tnlefty]

12. Kinda off topic, but while at a family gathering today, and yes I

drink just to get through them...

I was chatting with a woman for quite some time when her husband came to the table and sat down. Anyway we were discussing weight, etc. and I mentioned that I have gained weight because I intend to drink through the 2nd term of Dimson** so that maybe it won't hurt so bad. She laughed and said that her husband is "one of them". He took offense to her comment and asked me, "are you a liberal?"

Yes, I am. He said Sorry. I asked sorry for what? He said, because you're a liberal. I stated, perhaps I should be sorry for you because you're not.

I just can't help but wonder how these a**holes are gonna feel when/if the bottom falls out.

I just don't think that folks realize the tremendous amount of debt that ** has run up, nor how broke the treasury is, nor how much debt their kids are in, nor how much is related to "military spending" that isn't appropriated to supporting troops while in the field nor upon returning home.

[kentuck]

14. Bush could crap on a cracker and they would say....

Boy, that's a damn good crapper cracker !

[SledDriver]

16. I think you're right!

They have NO IDEA. They have been lead to believe that W isn't afraid to go after the "terrists". They cling to the notion that W will keep them safe from the evil, "they hate us for our freedoms" terrorists.

If/when exposed to the truth, they will dismiss it as the "librul" media's attempt to deceive them.

[Liberal In Texas]

13. Kentuck...I think you be a cynic. I am hoping for better.

But I fear you may be right.

[XOKCowboy]

17. Very cynical but unfortunately probably true

The "anarchists" I know are hoping for the same thing. They don't trust the Dems to pull us out of this abyss either. They see them as just more politicians with a different name. I hate to think that they may be right.

Isn't it wonderful to feel so hopeless with the leaders of our great country?

[Richard Steele]

18. "We're advising clients to invest HEAVILY in canned goods and shotguns"

Personally, I have very few dollars to "save"...
and I am not "saving" them as DOLLARS.

Whenever I have 60 bucks to spare, I buy TOOLS...
Books on basic CONSTRUCTION and "home maintenence" are also a good choice.

Seeds which grow foods that provide subsistence-level nutrition...
a cookbook or 3 to provide RECIPES for those foods...

And ammunition, whenever I find a good deal.
Ammo I can't use will be used as CURRENCY.

[Liberal In Texas]

22. You should read a book called "Lucifer's Hammer" by

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. An oldie but a goodie. ('91, I blieve.)



A comet strikes the earth and ...

... the dispossessed gather into marauding enclaves, huddle in fragile strongholds, or lose themselves in the diaspora. The many descriptions of survivalist mentality (fill the pool up with fresh water; buy up all the roast beef and turn it into beef jerky; safekeep important books like The Way Things Work in plastic baggies and squirrel them away) do more to convey the profundity of aftermath than anything else.

from a review at
http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue69/classic.html

[Richard Steele]

23. Way ahead of you, I read it 2 months after it went to paperback.

It was presented as a work of FICTION,
but Niven and Pournelle have made a career
of building novels around REAL potential futures.

[sue_66]

19. I Agree

With the right pushing creationism, we are falling behind in science as well as the standard of living. The U.S. seems to be sliding down, with no end in sight. When I read the headlines I shake my head in amazement... Guns, war, hate, oil at record highs, crooked republicans getting off scott free. We need a revolution!

[DivinBreuvage]

20. That's what the German Communists said about Hitler... didn't work

Well, actually it did, sort of, eventually... if you lived in East Germany.

I disagree with your assessment of the working class of the 1930s as being the new slaves. It was actually in the 1930s that the oppression of the worker, under the pressure of the Great Depression, began to turn around, as the power of the strike caught on and as the reddest of the red-state farmers began overturning milk trucks and stopping repo men at gunpoint to reclaim property that had been seized by the banks -- and as the clueless elite began to become terrified that the whole thing was going to blow up in their faces -- although they continued to fight Roosevelt every step of the way.

A great many of these same people then went on to defeat the German Wehrmacht in western Europe, and the German Wehrmacht was the finest army the world has ever seen -- to this day it remains the finest, despite the propaganda we are fed about our own "space-age" military.

That generation saved America, just as the generations that were called up in 1776 and 1861 saved America. Looking around the country now one might not feel too optimistic that the fourth time is the charm, but it's early yet. You can't test the mettle of a people till it's really down for the count, I think.