submitted by ghostsniper via Comments

Imagine spending money all day everyday and never having to answer for it.

Imagine a million gov’t employees doing the same. Every. Dam. Day. And NO accountability.

Think about the shenanigans you could conjure.

The unaccountable spending has gone on for decades, many decades, and no one has any idea how much has been spent. That $38til is just a wild assed guessed with no way to prove it. There is no audit on anything.

20 years ago there was a long and intense article on Lew Rockwell’s site that was very well written to where even a cave man could understand it. It laid it all out in detail and the gist of it was that the best unbiased guess is, at that time (20 years ago) the US gov’t was in debt more than 200,000 trillion dollars. Read that again. I don’t know if my keyboard has that many zeros in it, let’s see. $2,000,000,000,000,000,000.00

OK, I had to make a deal with my keyboard that I won’t use any more zeros for 3 more days cause I’m over the limit. See, here in the real world we have limits.

The gov’t has no limit. It makes the rules and breaks them when it wants and the rest of us still have to follow them.

$200k trillion is MORE than the value of everything on the planet. Though I’ve read about it numerous times I still do not have a clear picture of WHO that money is owed to. Stands to reason, whomever it is, they would be the wealthiest entity ever, if they collected it all at one time.

Talking about the gov’t debt is a circular (il)logic similar to the idea of the US gov’t itself. Think about it. “Of the people, by the people, for the people.” What the hell does that even mean? I, for one, take no responsibility for anything this criminal assed gov’t has ever done. I reject the notion that it does what it does, for me. I never asked it for anything.

As far as I have ever seen, this rotten assed gov’t is an entity in and of itself has zero to nothing to do with the average citizen. I can only speak for myself when I say that I have never known this gov’t to have ever done anything, anything at all, that was to MY benefit. Giving back some of what it stole from me is not a benefit. In my 71 years on this earth I have never received even one thing from this shitty gov’t that I didn’t pay dearly for. What I have received from it has been many lifetimes worth of grief on a scale that is unbelievable.

This lab stuff that DT brought up? Sure, I believe it happened. Why wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t any sentient human believe it? The employees of the gov’t don’t care what you believe because they know that there is absolutely nothing you nor anyone else can do about it. NO accountability!

I also believe this lab stuff is fairly mild stuff compared to lots of other things this criminal gov’t is involved in. Ever wonder how much skin can be peeled from a living human before it succumbs to shock? The gov’t knows.

Frankly, my trodden path has revealed such that there is nothing about this rotten assed gov’t that I wouldn’t believe. Once, when I was young and naïve, I put my life on the line for this gov’t and almost lost it all – and I pay the price to this day (in 1 week it will have been 51 years (20APR75)). I will never do that again. For decades at least I have been on “the other side”, and likely will remain there.

Peace, out.

The Raging Patriot
–gs, 2099

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Mason Bogie locomotives were first developed in the early 1870s. An articulated tank locomotive (no tender and the drive wheels swivel), it was intended to be used on poor track with sharp curves. 146 of these engines were built between 1872 and 1890.

The most famous of these engines ran on the Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad which operated 23 of them.

The only surviving engine of this type is the "Torch Lake" which is operational and lives at Greenfield Village outside Detroit.

Built in late 1873 by the Mason Machine Works of Massachusetts for use in the copper country on the Keweenaw Peninsula off Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the Calumet & Hecla Mining Co operated the engine as its #3 locomotive. It was obtained by Greenfield Village in 1968 and was once the oldest operating steam engine in the country. (In 1981, the 1831 John Bull operated under its own power but it is now on static display at the Smithsonian).

Several engines of the same era are operating or undergoing restoration at the Nevada State Museum in Carson City, the most famous of which is the 4-4-0 Reno built in 1872. Once common in westerns, the Reno was damaged in a fire at Old Tucson and has since been moved "home" to Carson City where it was once the primary passenger engine of the Virginia & Truckee of the Comstock Lode days. The 4-4-0 narrow gauge Eureka, also from Nevada, was built in 1875, is operable, and is often seen on the Durango & Silverton Railroad.

Last time I visited Greenfield Village, the Torch Lake was undergoing maintenance and parked in a roundhouse replica. I played around with the processing a bit - here are the reasonable results.

In the background sits an 1870 0-4-0 unnamed switch engine once used at one of Thomas Edison's companies. Henry Ford purchased the engine in 1932 for his museum after rebuilding it into a 4-4-0 configuration and named it "Edison". Both engines operate at the museum on a regular basis.

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