I say we won the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

[freemehul]

I don't have the economics of it.

I know the Iraq war is draining the US, but thats because Bush was a boneheaded enough to jump into a war that wasn't even connected to the terrorist attack without UN support.

This may be naive maths, but it seems to me that if a single country could maintain the occupation in Afghanistan for a year, then 30 countries could maintain it for at least 30 years.



Won't the family get some sort of coverage for the soldier's death?

The way mortgages work is retarded anyways. If you manage to pay up 90% of your house's value, you should own 90% and the bank should own the remaining 10%.

Then again, the banks are holding the big end of the stick vs the would-be owners (hence the whole "invisible hand" of the market really won't regulate itself here) so it would really be up to the state to do something about it if it weren't too busy appealing to constituents that have been brain washed by the empty rethorics of right wing intellectuals (otherwise, you'd have a bunch of angry poor right wing voters with delusions of upcoming wealth screaming in the streets for their patriotic right to be exploited... if it weren't people's lives that are on the line, it'd be a funny spectacle indeed).



Religions of judeo-christian roots have 2 main things going for them:

1) Love thy neighbor and treat them as you'd want to be treated

2) You will live eternally in happy bliss if you behave yourselves

We can agree that religion the way it is run by the fanatic extreme gives up on theme (1). It becomes worst as religion tries to get involved with politics (really, the whole "religion is not about politics" adage is for religion's own good... you start doing serious politics with religion and you end up with a generation that truly despise the entire religious institution like it happened in the province where I live).

They can still brainwash their young into following theme (2), assuming that they exert strict control over the environment in which they are raised.

The moment you start giving the children real free will on what to believe with alternatives, most will either become agnostic/atheist or religious moderates (meaning they believe in the better aspects of what religion has to offer, but don't think everything the religious texts say is gospel).

Those that become religious moderates will do so only if religion can provide them some sort of emotional solace, which it won't do if it doesn't uphold theme (1).

OK lets go through that 1 by 1, and why I unfortunately disagree with some of this...

1st the coverage isn't high enough to cover subprime interest
2nd if you know 1st is true and unfortunately it is true, then what follows is banks are going bust. Remember the mortgages are piled up onto a big heap. The latter is a perfectly normal behavior under normal circumstances, because as a bank you want to spread risk. However if the heap is big and you don't know who has what cut and unfortuntely it is big, then what you get is a domino effect, where 1 big bank topples and takes the rest with it (and this can still happen). Now stack this up for 30 years (which is a whole generation) and you're talking disaster of a gargantuan proportion.

In that scenario i don't see religious fanaticism becoming the big issue, but I do see nationalism becoming the problem like what happened to Europe in the mid 19th century. People seem to forget this but there were several waves of agricultural crises that hit Europe and the U.S. very hard in the mid 19th century. And remember who are the biggest mortgages takers in a population? Right, it's farmers!

A lot of modern nations came into existence in those years. To name just a few: Germany, Italy, Romania, Hungary and Spain.

And do you know what all of these nations have in common? Think of WW2!