I am sick and damn tired of Marxists in this country telling us how corporations are evil. They are not evil. A powerful government that tells us what to do is evil.
Hear, hear!
Corporations have no power except that of persuasion, and if they do not satisfy the desires of their customers, they go out of business.
Government, on the other hand, sticks a gun in your face and steals your money whether you like it or not. The otherwise-unemployable liberal arts majors who populate the civil "service" and eat out our substance don't have any customers, and face no consequences for delivering shitty service or outright tyranny.
Anyone who thinks government service is somehow more worthy or noble than working for a corporation is an idiot, and my mortal enemy. I'd much rather have unfettered capitalism and no government than strong givernment and statist control of industry.
Oil company profit margins are typically in the range of 10 to 15%, which is totally in line with other industries. If you advocate confiscatory, punitive taxes for the 10% profit Exxon earned last year, why aren't you advocating the same for Ben and Jerry's 40% or Google's 25%?
Most of the extra money we are paying for fuel is ending up in the hands of scum like Hugo Chavez and the Saudi royal family.
Or maybe it should be treated like the individuals who run corporations (and make decisions) but who never seem to be punished for their egregious misdeeds, because, "oh, it was the corporation that did it"?
Whom would that be? Bernard Ebbers of Worldcom, now serving 25 years in the Federal pen? Or maybe Jeff Skilling of Enron, serving 24 years. Jamie Olis, Dynegy? 24 years. John and Timothy Rigas of Adelphia? 15 years and 20 years respectively. Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco? 8 to 25 years. Joseph Nacchio of Qwest? 6 years. Even silly Martha Stewart got almost a year.
Take note, all of the crimes committed by these corporate chieftains took place under the watch of party boy Bill Clinton, who received huge donations from many of them, and looked the other way while the good times were rolling. It fell to George W. Bush to actually put these men in jail.
Do not buy in to the Left's anti-corporate bullshit. There is plenty of accountability these days.
You would think they might have learned something by now, from the obvious impotence of their god in the face of Western technological, military, and cultural supremacy.
Muslims control 1/3 of the worlds oil supply and I have no doubt in part the recent crisis are in fact engineered. Nuking Saudi Arabia is a good start.
I don't want them nuked. I'm a reasonable and merciful man. I just want Israel and the US to conquer the place, seize the oil fields as compensation for 1400 years of bloodthirsty Muslim oppression, and excise Mecca from this plane of existence.
I want to see the Wahhabi scum driven at gunpoint into the Empty Quarter, there to live like their savage ancestors, without any amenities of modern life. They WANT to return to the seventh century. Let's put them there, good and hard.
I suspect Steyn has the balls to heap abuse on the "court" from start to finish, refuse to pay a penny of fines, and with sneers of contempt, dare the commissars to lock him in prison. It will be a spectacle unlike any in recent Canadian history. With any luck, this will be the end of the kangaroo thoughtcrime courts.
Create name badges with equations, e.g. e^(pi*i) = -1, or integ(0,1,sqrt(x)*dx)=2/3. Cut them in half. Give the formulas to the chicks and the solutions to the guys. Allow everyone to find and pair up with their partner. In addition to being a great icebreaker, it will provide the guys an excuse for intently staring at the girls' titties.
The problem with collecting use taxes is that there is no withholding mechanism. That means they have to be collected after the fact from individuals. Historically that kind of tax has often meant tar and feathers, or a rope and lamppost, for the tax collector. The tax-hungry states are now trying to get the withholding done by the big retailers so they can collect their money without getting run off by a hillbilly with a shotgun.
On a tangential note, I support eliminating all withholding for all taxes, and making people write one big fat check per year for their tax bill. I WANT to see government dismembered and useless bureaucrats hanging from lamp posts.
Big Business LOVES Big Government. They are delighted to beat up their smaller competitors with rent-seeking regulation and Byzantine tax structures. You'd think the blowhard populist Democrats would have figured this out by now, but they are economic retards.
I don't think I131, or any of the other traditional nuclear medicine isotopes can reasonably be the culprit here
I-131 is indeed used for treatment because of its beta particle emissions. However, it also produces abundant high energy gamma radiation, most of which is at 364 keV. This most certainly can be detected with a Geiger counter, gamma camera, or survey meter. It gets used for treatment of hyperthyroidism and thyroid cancer in doses that are typically quite a bit higher than other diagnostic nuclear isotopes, and is by far the most likely culprit in this story.
Just a planted article to make the public believe that the equipment works at all... Feel a bit safer, you know?
If someone has recently had a high dose of radioactive iodine for thyroid cancer treatment, there is equipment in most hospitals that can detect them from ten or fifteen yards away. I would expect DHS equipment to be at least as sensitive.
My engineering teacher spent 15 years in the Air Force as a flight test engineer and the guy is a complete hardass in class: he'll let you make a fool of yourself, tell you to sit down and shut-up, then make it a point to tell you why your math failed.
Yep. If someone in his position makes a mathematical error, several hundred human beings may suffer a gruesome, fiery death. The sooner that budding engineers learn this lesson, the better.
Me, I'd go with a real live mule instead for all applications you'd use this in. Same payload capacity, not much bigger, totally silent, self-refuelling, costs $hundreds rather than $hojillions.
My grandfather was an old cowboy and knew everything there was to know about packing stuff on mules and horses. He once worked for a friend who had a very lucrative contract from the Army to train Green Berets in the care and use of pack mules. They used them a lot in the 80's down in Central America, and I think they had some in Afghanistan also.
The "totally silent" part of your comment is usually true, but once in a while they will let fly with noisy braying that could give away a unit's position.
Whats to blame is the psychiatrists. They're virtually trained (and not by the big pharams, though they don't help) that meds are the cure to everything, as opposed to psychologists.
Sigmund Freud tried for decades to treat schizophrenics by talking to them, and never cured a single patient. Psychologists have nothing of value to offer to patients with schizophrenia.
The anti-psychotic drugs, for all their potential side effects, are the only treatments that can give these people anything like a normal life.
I agree that ADD/ADHD is over-diagnosed and over-treated. In many cases it is behavior that is normal for boys, but overwhelming for the many stupid and lazy fem-hag educrats teaching our children nowadays.
The broken window fallacy pertains to the erroneous notion that you can increase overall economic productivity by going out and breaking windows to provide jobs for glaziers.
The broken window theory (made famous by Rudy Giuliani and his police commissioner) pertains to the argument that leaving broken windows un-fixed in slum neighborhoods sends the message that anti-social behavior is tolerated. Fix the broken windows, or so they claim, and you get not just less vandalism but less murder and robbery too.
I have heard the term parable applied to both of these concepts, but I think it was Bastiat who first did so, to illustrate the fallacy.
Totally serious. You ever met a real Ainu? I have. Reddish brown hair, hazel eyes, olive skin, very heavy beard. Definitely not of East Asian or American Indian appearance, not even close. Could have been an Armenian, or Black Irish, or southern Italian.
If we're going to grant government handouts based on whose people were here first, the Indians lose. There are just too many archaeological discoveries that show they are relative latecomers who exterminated the indigenous Caucasoid population.
Far better that we all treat each other based on who we are, rather than who our ancestors were, with totally color-blind government policies. Race is meaningless to citizenship. I wish they wouldn't even collect the statistics.
This is, of course, before we even get mired in the way the US has handled its slavery and segregation issues.
We handled it excellently, in my opinion. Better than any civilization that came before us.
Slavery was part of the general human condition from the dawn of time. Who finally put a stop to it, at least amongst civilized people, once and for all? White Europeans and their descendants in America, that's who. The Union Army and the Royal Navy did more to abolish slavery than any other institutions in human history. One of my own ancestors ran a station on the Underground Railroad, and another was an officer in the Union Army and shed his blood to set the slaves free. Nobody in my family ever owned a slave.
Black people should be gratefully thanking us white folks, instead of bitching about their raw deal and adopting Muslim names. The Arabs were enslaving black Africans a thousand years before Americans, and they're still doing it today.
I don't accept any guilt for what people who looked like me but were not related to me did hundreds of years ago. Period. I won't apologize, or pay any reparations, or accept anything less than fully color-blind treatment before the law, with no set-asides, quotas, preferences, or affirmative action. Period. Not now, not ever. Any minority who doesn't like it can go fuck himself. I do not care. I don't owe him jack-fucking-shit.
The first inhabitants of North America were white, like Kennewick Man. Then Asian interlopers came over and killed them all off, settling here and forming the various Indian tribes. We Europeans are just taking back what's ours. Let the Indians go back where they came from in Siberia if they don't like it.
That's the World Wide Web you are referring to, not the Internet as a whole. The US created ARPANET, BITNET, CSNET, USENET, and all the other predecessors of the Internet. The World Wide Web is a relatively recent application, running on a physical network of long standing that was invented and funded almost entirely by the United States of America.
I say again, to all the rest of the world, go ahead and build your own fucking Euronet or Chinanet. We don't need you. If you want to use our Internet, then you fucking well play by our rules.
Fuck all the other countries. This is our Internet. We created it. Let them build their own fucking ChinaNet if they want. I don't want the UN douchebags controlling ANYTHING that pertains to my liberty or financial well-being.
Slashdot Mirror
Hear, hear!
Corporations have no power except that of persuasion, and if they do not satisfy the desires of their customers, they go out of business.
Government, on the other hand, sticks a gun in your face and steals your money whether you like it or not. The otherwise-unemployable liberal arts majors who populate the civil "service" and eat out our substance don't have any customers, and face no consequences for delivering shitty service or outright tyranny.
Anyone who thinks government service is somehow more worthy or noble than working for a corporation is an idiot, and my mortal enemy. I'd much rather have unfettered capitalism and no government than strong givernment and statist control of industry.
-ccm
Oil company profit margins are typically in the range of 10 to 15%, which is totally in line with other industries. If you advocate confiscatory, punitive taxes for the 10% profit Exxon earned last year, why aren't you advocating the same for Ben and Jerry's 40% or Google's 25%? Most of the extra money we are paying for fuel is ending up in the hands of scum like Hugo Chavez and the Saudi royal family.
Whatever you say, Obama.
Whom would that be? Bernard Ebbers of Worldcom, now serving 25 years in the Federal pen? Or maybe Jeff Skilling of Enron, serving 24 years. Jamie Olis, Dynegy? 24 years. John and Timothy Rigas of Adelphia? 15 years and 20 years respectively. Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco? 8 to 25 years. Joseph Nacchio of Qwest? 6 years. Even silly Martha Stewart got almost a year.
Take note, all of the crimes committed by these corporate chieftains took place under the watch of party boy Bill Clinton, who received huge donations from many of them, and looked the other way while the good times were rolling. It fell to George W. Bush to actually put these men in jail.
Do not buy in to the Left's anti-corporate bullshit. There is plenty of accountability these days.
You would think they might have learned something by now, from the obvious impotence of their god in the face of Western technological, military, and cultural supremacy.
I don't want them nuked. I'm a reasonable and merciful man. I just want Israel and the US to conquer the place, seize the oil fields as compensation for 1400 years of bloodthirsty Muslim oppression, and excise Mecca from this plane of existence.
I want to see the Wahhabi scum driven at gunpoint into the Empty Quarter, there to live like their savage ancestors, without any amenities of modern life. They WANT to return to the seventh century. Let's put them there, good and hard.
I would just like to say, you are a worthless piece of shit for trying to justify this outrage. Drop dead.
I suspect Steyn has the balls to heap abuse on the "court" from start to finish, refuse to pay a penny of fines, and with sneers of contempt, dare the commissars to lock him in prison. It will be a spectacle unlike any in recent Canadian history. With any luck, this will be the end of the kangaroo thoughtcrime courts.
-ccm
Quite so.
-ccm
I want my government reduced to 1890 levels, and armies of government useless eaters forced to find honest work.
On a tangential note, I support eliminating all withholding for all taxes, and making people write one big fat check per year for their tax bill. I WANT to see government dismembered and useless bureaucrats hanging from lamp posts.
-ccm
Then don't vote Democrat.
Big Business LOVES Big Government. They are delighted to beat up their smaller competitors with rent-seeking regulation and Byzantine tax structures. You'd think the blowhard populist Democrats would have figured this out by now, but they are economic retards.
I-131 is indeed used for treatment because of its beta particle emissions. However, it also produces abundant high energy gamma radiation, most of which is at 364 keV. This most certainly can be detected with a Geiger counter, gamma camera, or survey meter. It gets used for treatment of hyperthyroidism and thyroid cancer in doses that are typically quite a bit higher than other diagnostic nuclear isotopes, and is by far the most likely culprit in this story.
-ccm
If someone has recently had a high dose of radioactive iodine for thyroid cancer treatment, there is equipment in most hospitals that can detect them from ten or fifteen yards away. I would expect DHS equipment to be at least as sensitive.
-ccm
Yep. If someone in his position makes a mathematical error, several hundred human beings may suffer a gruesome, fiery death. The sooner that budding engineers learn this lesson, the better.
-ccm
My grandfather was an old cowboy and knew everything there was to know about packing stuff on mules and horses. He once worked for a friend who had a very lucrative contract from the Army to train Green Berets in the care and use of pack mules. They used them a lot in the 80's down in Central America, and I think they had some in Afghanistan also.
The "totally silent" part of your comment is usually true, but once in a while they will let fly with noisy braying that could give away a unit's position.
-ccm
Sigmund Freud tried for decades to treat schizophrenics by talking to them, and never cured a single patient. Psychologists have nothing of value to offer to patients with schizophrenia.
The anti-psychotic drugs, for all their potential side effects, are the only treatments that can give these people anything like a normal life.
I agree that ADD/ADHD is over-diagnosed and over-treated. In many cases it is behavior that is normal for boys, but overwhelming for the many stupid and lazy fem-hag educrats teaching our children nowadays.
The broken window theory (made famous by Rudy Giuliani and his police commissioner) pertains to the argument that leaving broken windows un-fixed in slum neighborhoods sends the message that anti-social behavior is tolerated. Fix the broken windows, or so they claim, and you get not just less vandalism but less murder and robbery too.
I have heard the term parable applied to both of these concepts, but I think it was Bastiat who first did so, to illustrate the fallacy.
-ccm
If we're going to grant government handouts based on whose people were here first, the Indians lose. There are just too many archaeological discoveries that show they are relative latecomers who exterminated the indigenous Caucasoid population.
Far better that we all treat each other based on who we are, rather than who our ancestors were, with totally color-blind government policies. Race is meaningless to citizenship. I wish they wouldn't even collect the statistics.
-ccm
We handled it excellently, in my opinion. Better than any civilization that came before us.
Slavery was part of the general human condition from the dawn of time. Who finally put a stop to it, at least amongst civilized people, once and for all? White Europeans and their descendants in America, that's who. The Union Army and the Royal Navy did more to abolish slavery than any other institutions in human history. One of my own ancestors ran a station on the Underground Railroad, and another was an officer in the Union Army and shed his blood to set the slaves free. Nobody in my family ever owned a slave.
Black people should be gratefully thanking us white folks, instead of bitching about their raw deal and adopting Muslim names. The Arabs were enslaving black Africans a thousand years before Americans, and they're still doing it today.
I don't accept any guilt for what people who looked like me but were not related to me did hundreds of years ago. Period. I won't apologize, or pay any reparations, or accept anything less than fully color-blind treatment before the law, with no set-asides, quotas, preferences, or affirmative action. Period. Not now, not ever. Any minority who doesn't like it can go fuck himself. I do not care. I don't owe him jack-fucking-shit.
-ccm
-ccm
I say again, to all the rest of the world, go ahead and build your own fucking Euronet or Chinanet. We don't need you. If you want to use our Internet, then you fucking well play by our rules.
-ccm
-ccm