And it's the Iron Chancellor, as usual.

Basically, the Polish prime minister asked for 10,000 NATO boots to be put permanently on the ground way back in March. Last week, however, Angela Merkel put down the idea of permanent military placements in Eastern Europe while she was in Latvia.

There are hopes that a new action plan, to be revealed at the summit in Wales. Some hawks, however, feel it nothing more than a feat of mental gymnastics that Camnator would be proud of. The problem arises form the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, which forbid the establishment of permanent troop deployments, although Russia hasn't been exactly holding up her part of the bargain. Merkel, predictably, thinks we should abide by the treaty.

One "senior NATO official" also ruled out permanent deployments, and instead made reference to "appropriate presence", which is a deliberately open-ended use of language. The recent creation of an expeditionary force/"high readiness brigade", led by British officers and capable of being launched in "hours", will be stationed mainly in Poland and have its HQ on the Baltic coast.

There are a number of other placements in Eastern Europe, including the U.S.'s EAS in Germany, British paratroopers in Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and Danish, French and British fighter jets in Poland and Estonia.

This might sound substantial, but the biggest NATO Baltic war-game consisted of 6,000 troops. Russia's war-games around the Baltic and Ukrainian borders have involved 150,000.

>mfw I don't really know what a gypsy is

They're like nomads. They don't pay taxes and move from campsite to campsite as the police move them along.

Constitutionalist/Libertarian

If you had to pick one label.

Which overrides which? The constitution, or your sense of liberty?

I really don't know. Depending on the candidate, likely Republican.

When it comes to the Presidentials, though, they always pick fucking loonies. I'd have chosen Obama over both McCain and Romney.

Dibs on meta

Voting is actually really important. Fine, skip the nation shit, but your state and local ballot issues will more directly effect you.

On a completely unrelated note, when's the next giveaway?

Oh boy let's throw in the word subhuman so we can equate the dirty atheist to a Nazi or other universally hated villain.

Because anyone who is openly critical of theism and it's adherents is an evil Nazi who wants to oppress them.

Fuck you.
I have a low opinion of theists like I have a low opinion of Republicans. They're stupid and I'm not afraid to point it out, but I would not try and suppress them. No, I would not do to them what they have done to people like me for centuries.

Seriously, FUUUUCK YOOOOUUU. I have suffered at the hands of theism. I have been physically assaulted, I have family members who refuse to speak to me, I have had friends leave me. I know what it's like to be a victim of an ignorant majority.

So don't you FUCKING DARE compare ME to THEM.

I skimmed through the link and I noticed one thing: No mention of the 1970 (or 1971) act that fully eliminated the remainder of the gold standard. While it does mention the 1934 act of basically banning gold for civilian ownership, gold was still used as money backing till the 1970s. At that time our national debt numbered like $20B (rough estimate) due to being limited by the reserve of gold. Ever since then the debt has greatly risen to the current $17T because there's no limitation of the amount of money that can be printed. Basically we've been increasing inflation for the past 3+ decades and it'll only get worse, especially due to Iran not selling itself and oil to America. Oil is the only thing giving the dollar any value and we know oil is a non-renewable resource so it greatly explains American hostility and war-like nature in areas rich with oil

Fun fact with this video: Around 1:50 mark, clip of Nixon is shown and he mentions Secretary Connally (John Connally); that's one of my distant cousins.....think 4th or 5th but nerveless I'm related to him

Anyway, the path to a gold standard would take time. It would involve maintaining a level budget yearly, pay off debt/interest and reduce spending to get back to a responsible level where the gold in existence can cover the money bills

Some inflation is better than zero inflation because prices (especially wages) can be incredibly sticky and can threaten the flow of nominal income; it's no surprise that countries recovered from the Great Depression in the order that they stopped exchanging currency for gold. Speaking about nominal income, the Fed has actually been quite contractionary with its monetary policy throughout recent history.

As for the petrodollar? That's dubious at best, and I have my problems with SCG despite the obvious fearmongering. It's tempting to view U.S. foreign policy through one monolithic lens, and it makes sense. But, as David Hume says, reason is the slave of the passions, and, having an intuition towards patterns, its easy to fall into a system and then reason your way into justifying it. His claim that the U.S. lost revenue by switching the sale of oil into dollars from euros doesn't make much sense, and he essentially boils the entire thing down to mad bankers pushing us towards a global apocalypse in order to prop up the dollar; it's un-falsifiable. Once you create a paradigm where aggressive behaviour supposedly falls under some elaborate, aggregate plan you can then stamp your feet and point to further aggression as vindication when really all you're doing is making a lot of noise about nothing.

By the way, American foreign policy is probably driven more by pro-Israeli sentiments than the petrodollar. That'll be tested fairly soon anyway, since the petrodollar just died.

Dem strings on dose pajama bottoms

dem muddahfuhkas

What would be your overall socio-econo-political label? Also, if you feel like differentiating, what labels would you choose for your social, economical and political labels separately.

Overall - Liberal.
Social - Libertarian.
Economic - Neo-monetarist.
Political - Conservative.

you bastard

u jel m80

gypsies are the one ethnic gorup i would genuinely like to see genocided
humanely, I don't want them to suffer, but they need to be wiped from the earth
I'm not even being sarcastic slightly here with gypsies

That's disgusting

gypsies are sub-human
yeah, gypsies have no place on earth
at the very very least, very least. I would deport every single one, immediately
as in, get the army, round them up, send them to dover
france loves gypsies, they can take care of them

People have accused me of intolerance, despite being quite liberal, but I'm an angel compared to you.

Seriously though, steralisation for gypsies, that's not even inhumane
They get to live

YES IT IS

What the fuck is wrong with you?


Well fuck me. Fascism lives.

Haha, don't worry. I am sure you will find someone.

There's a chick in my class who seems quite into me. Maybe she'll be my next victim.

When I say rigged I do not mean in the sense that they enter fraudulent votes into the system, but rigged as in the media purposely ignores certain individuals and tries to completely shut them out, as do the political parties. It is what they did with Ron Paul during both the '08 and '12 elections.

Yeah, I agree with that.

Political parties and major news media outlets are not legitimate sources of information either, and elections are rigged because of false information by the parties I mentioned.

"Rigged", eh. I wouldn't say rigged.

America isn't a democracy, though, I agree there. We choose who to have, they just tend to be equally shit.