Comment Re:An intelligence officer? Well he MUST be expert (Score 1) 270
It's as if you didn't even read my post. Read what you are responding to before blabbing on.
Obama wanted [theatlantic.com] to extend the war, not end it. But the Iraqis refused to let U.S. forces go on committing mass murder with impunity, so Obama had to adhere to the withdrawal timeline negotiated by Bush.
That's a popular theory, but it doesn't seem backed up by the evidence. It looks like Obama merely grabbed onto that as an excuse to leave. Check out this New Yorker article for example. From the reports, Obama was not pushing to leave troops, he was stalling and looking for a way out:
President Obama, too, was ambivalent about retaining even a small force in Iraq. For several months, American officials told me, they were unable to answer basic questions in meetings with Iraqis—like how many troops they wanted to leave behind—because the Administration had not decided. “We got no guidance from the White House,” Jeffrey told me. “We didn’t know where the President was. Maliki kept saying, ‘I don’t know what I have to sell.’ ” At one meeting, Maliki said that he was willing to sign an executive agreement granting the soldiers permission to stay, if he didn’t have to persuade the parliament to accept immunity. The Obama Administration quickly rejected the idea. “The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible,” Sami al-Askari, the Iraqi member of parliament, said........Many Iraqi and American officials are convinced that even a modest force would have been able to prevent chaos
Obama seemed to affirm that fact when he was debating Romney. He said:
MR. ROMNEY: [W]ith regards to Iraq, you and I agreed, I believe, that there should have been a status of forces agreement. Did you —
PRESIDENT OBAMA: That's not true.
So it seems pretty clear Obama was against leaving a small force in Iraq.
Blaming the Bush timetable is silly.....he had several years to change the timetable (and not to mention that Bush was an idiot so doing anything because that is what Bush planned is utterly moronic. If Obama said, "I did this because Bush planned it" then I would have significantly less respect for him if he really meant that).
They've been doing that for nearly a decade now, and it has successfully prevented the deflation, but it's a little baffling that it hasn't touched off more inflation than it has.
The formula is MV=PQ, where PQ is the cost of everything in the economy, M is the money supply, and V is how quickly money changes hands. M has gone up dramatically (which you mention), but V has gone down just as dramatically, which means banks (or others) have not been spending their money, they've been keeping it.
Essentially what has happened with the federal reserve: keeping interest rates low has given banks free money. They needed money after the crisis, because otherwise they'd be bankrupt. TARP was the initial attempt to give them money, but that didn't work out politically so the Fed found another way to do it.
So, the Fed printed a lot of money, but it just ended up in banks who eventually will use the money to write off bad loans.
Consider the Prince of Wales, sunk by the Bismark. The Bismark was using just such electromechanical analog computers for fire control.
Oh, I thought you were talking about anti-aircraft guns, not anti-ship weapons.
In WW2 we had analog computers that could aim guns at moving targets from moving platforms. This is actually a harder proposition than aiming a laser; bullets don't move at the speed of light and you've got to compute lead. They did it without electronic computers.
They also didn't do very well
Always looking backwards, always telling us *why* something happened, never making future predictions.
Economics makes plenty of predictions, and gets them right. MV=PQ is well-tested as a theory, and you can predict things based on that.
The problem is predicting what we want to know......how can we end the recession?, for example. This is like asking how can we make a warp drive? and then proclaiming physics is a failure when it can't answer.
If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
