Plato? Aristotle? Morons.

Give me Aristophanes any day, the first person to figure out that people liked to laugh when they went to the "move-ies." He also managed to write political satire in the ancient world and not get killed for it (the audience was laughing too hard to try).

And yes, it is better in Attic because you get all the puns.

It was so inconsequential that Vice President Stephens made the Cornerstone Speech (21 March 1861) in which he said:

..."Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth." (And so on for four more paragraphs.)

Slavery was a key issue which divided the nation and the south was wrong on slavery. The north was hardly better on this (the 1863 draft riots spring to mind). Still, slavery was a major issue in the beginning. Lincoln certainly took advantage of the south's dependence on slavery and European abolitionism, but the war was about slavery and the state's right to keep slaves.

It seems the Hegemons of Humorlessness are failing to applaud our homophonic hero.

Your definition of cause seems very broad. The Korean war can just as easily be explained as another iteration of the Sino-Japanese wars which had been fought over Korea 1894-95, 1937-45 combined with the revolutionary zeal shown by communist revolution (see also Soviet-Polish war 1920). Or as a hegemonic war by China. That the Chinese were "godless" and the UN "godly" was a rhetorical distinction made after the beginning of the war and not a cause.

In God we trust was first added to US currency during the American Civil War, it was adopted as the official motto in 1956. The Korean War ran 1950-1953 (although a peace treaty has not been signed to date). Given this, the idea that the Korean War was motivated by religion is absurd.

Now, if you want to make the case that the American Civil War was between the defenders of the True Faith and those Godless Rebels, I'd love to watch the flame war.

Because there is a large pool of money chasing safety. When there is a high demand with limited supply, the price increases. In the case of fed bonds the price increases causes the interest rate to decrease. This is because the rate is determined by the amount paid at purchase relative the the value returned at maturity. At one point the rate was actually negative (you paid more for the bond than you got at maturity). As lending rates are tied to the fed rates, none of the US rates are going up (i.e. the price for the bond relative to the money at maturity is still close to 1:1 or 0% interest).

I still like my version better. We decided to fawn all over the rich and hope that they would share their largesse, forgetting entirely that like other bullies, they had no incentive to share. We let them keep it in hopes that they would be moved to give back some of it to us.

Sure there were lies, but a lot of them were ones we told ourselves "if I give up prosperity now, I'll get a double helping in the future" and "if I we tax the rich, when I become rich I'll have to pay higher tax."

We could eliminate the entire federal govt. except Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and payment on the national debt and we would STILL be paying out more than we bring in. Think of that, no DOD, TSA, DHS, VA, NPS, NFS, BLM etc. nothing. Not even the senators and congresscritters getting paid.

And we'd still have to borrow money to make the nation go.

For the past thirty years we have held up the image of the put upon rich person who would love to invest in the US but can't because of our terrible tax burden. So the tax code has been modified to take the burden off the most wealthy [our top tax rate used to be 50% now it is 35%]. We did this in hopes that the wealthy would let the rest of the economy have more. This has not happened. In fact, the money has become more concentrated at the top while wages have stagnated at the bottom and in the middle. Instead of investing in industry, the Giant Pool of Money at the Top has bought US debt [we don't owe our soul to the Chinese, we owe it to the wealthy] and, because T-bills have had lousy returns for a decade, the money also went to fuel speculative bubbles [including the global housing bubble].

In this situation, where the top earners [about 5% of the population] have over 85% of the wealth, to whine about horrible confiscatory tax and wave the class warfare banner is beyond absurd. In order to have class war you need to have class, is the GOP saying that we still have class in the democratic United States?

Which explains the Soviet soldiers who strapped on satchel charges and threw themselves under German tanks during the fighting in Crimea. Communism is explicitly atheist and by extension a "no afterlife" group.

One could argue that patriotism is religion (they were defending their country from invasion after all) but claiming equivalence between religion and patriotism does make one look a bit of a prat.

Ah, but what do you call the people who were NOT raised by the boomers (Gen-X f'rinstance). Too old to be hipsters, too young (and hopefully, intelligent) to be boomers, born in the smoking ruins of the 60's and coming of age in the era of national impotence (1970's-1980's).

All generations suck in different ways. Boomers just suck harder than other generations and believe that a Happy Face will see us through (they were raised in the 50's, what can we expect?

nah, we'd have to give the 'buyer' money to take it off our hands. Not even Mexico would pay us for it.

Exactly.

S&P has a long history of issuing downgrades when default is inevitable (AIG, Enron, Worldcom, & the whole MBS/CDO debacle). If they were the weather service, they'd issue tornado warnings when debris was already hitting your house and the wind was a deafening shriek.

And the surplus was used to buy Treasury Bonds thus it now counts as part of the national debt. Sure, we "owe it to ourselves" but we still owe it.

Consider the irony of paying taxes to contribute to a fund that buys debt we have to pay via taxation.

Yes, and ten years from then they will be even better and cheaper, so what? If you don't do something because it'll be even better in th future, you do nothing today. So, while you could be offsetting some of your energy costs now and for ten years into the future, you are instead paying the same While-U-Wait.