Or we could have reasonable gun control laws. Cue the nutcases who think they're going to 1) have a reason to fight the US Army and 2) think they could possibly beat them.
Slow down there, skipper. You're under the misapprehension that Pfizer exists to make pharmaceuticals. Pfizer exists to make profit with advertising, and they happen to sell pharmaceuticals.
The only solution to the problem you mention is to strip search everyone, and that would be very time-consuming.
Or stop becoming involved in entangling alliances overseas for the short term benefits of cheap energy sources that have been ruining the region for decades. Unless you actually believe they hate us "for our freedom."
At the outset, the author draws several conceptual distinctions that are subsequently applied to the case-study at hand. He distinguishes between the "American national interest paradigm," according to which U.S. policy toward the Middle East is primarily determined by vital security interests and strategic preferences that American policy makers have sought to maintain and implement throughout the region (such as trying to resolve or stabilize the Arab-Israeli conflict, maintaining access to Arab oil, containing the Soviet Union), and the "special relationship" paradigm, according to which American policy toward Israel is mainly derived from "a broad cluster of predispositions, sentiments and attitudes toward Israel in American public opinion, which are permeated with sympathy, support and affection."...
The author argues that between 1957 and 1960, a gradual shift occurred in the American policy toward the Middle East in general, and toward Israel in particular. Seeking to create a series of bilateral security arrangements with individual Middle Eastern states in response to regional crises that took place between 1957 and 1959, the Eisenhower administration no longer deemed an Arab-Israeli peace as a sine qua non for attaining Arab unity and support in the struggle against Communist expansionism. As a direct result of these changes, "the perception of Israel as a potential strategic asset to the United States came to increasingly permeate the cognitive map of Washington's policy makers." This shift became most vividly evident in July 1958, when Israel was called upon and agreed to permit a British and American airlift of strategic materials through Israeli airspace to prop up the embattled Jordanian monarchy that was being challenged by a radical nationalist uprising fomented by Egypt's Nasser. Ben-Zvi claims that "the 1958 Jordanian Crisis can be thought of as the 'trigger event,' which provided the impetus for completing the swing of the perceptual pendulum from Israel as a strategic liability and an impediment to American regional designs, to Israel as an indispensable asset to American and British strategic plans and objectives." These developments provide additional proof that the shift in the American strategy toward Israel in the late 1950s was due exclusively to external factors in the Middle East, and not to any lobbying activities by pro-Israeli organizations.
Hollywood doesn't push movies that actually suck. The plots may be generic, and made for mass appeal, but the truly awful releases are not previewed or advertised beyond what it takes to satisfy the egos that made the trash in the first place.
Transformers (I didn't see the second one) was a steaming pile of shit in terms of art, but it was an okay movie. Explosions. Sweaty young women. One dimensional characters. Sounds a lot like the James Bond flicks from the 60s, doesn't it?
It's been cheaper for a long time. But without an enemy image, there is no way to propagandize the population in order to suck a trillion dollars in war spending out of their wallets every year, and allow Lockheed and Boeing and Blackwater to take their 20% cut.
If the policy planners in washington had figured out that terrorism was more effective than communism at stoking hysteria and paranoia, we would probably have the same relationship with Russia as we do with China. The only downside is that they are unknowingly pushing distaste for religious fundamentalism, which may have a negative effect on their core voting bloc.
The Israelis have trained interrogators, who interview every single human being before they are granted entry into their country. The team is highly professional, and they constantly try to send through their own people with falsified documentation, and if there are any people who are not caught, everyone they passed is terminated from their position.
Forcing everyone to throw away their water and take off their shoes and get body scanned is a surefire way to give everyone a completely false sense of security. If I were a terrorist cell, I'd be applying all over America for airport jobs. Once you are hired and they know your name, and you are waved passed security, you begin stashing explosives for later retrieval by third parties who will walk right through security, pickup the package, and wink at the flight attendants as they take their seat.
And the real trick is that the next terrorist attack won't be on a plane. It will probably be a real nuke stashed in a port somewhere, since we don't even bother to check the trillions of pounds of cargo we import each year.
And when the terrorists find a disaffected white nutcase who wants to go down in history as the world's biggest terrorist, he'll walk right by the line of PhD students who are being strip searched for having the wrong skin color.
You don't have to go with Google. I was just pointing out that an unencrypted laptop is vastly more insecure than hosting your e-mail at an ISP, with proper password policies and session timeouts.
The hysteria about cloud computing is just a sideshow to actual security concerns, like physical access, multiple layers of encryption, and the social engineering that usually negates the first two. And if you don't know that, I hope you aren't an IT consultant.
If you forced a login with a quick time out for all of those gmail accounts, that's a hell of a lot more secure than storing the documents on your laptop, which can be stolen and broken pretty easily. (These kids aren't going to password protect bootup and encrypt the hard drive. ) If you need an e-mail even if the internet is down, it should probably be in your notes in your word processor anyway. And unless you're not going to use WiFi, you are already sending your data over insecure connections.
And if you think other ISPs don't give up your data already... well, you're just not paying attention.
If you want to use and share data on the internet, there are risks. If you want to remember something that cannot possibly be intercepted by a third party, write it down on a piece of paper, put it in a safe, and hope no one steals the safe.
This is the kind of idiotic hyperbole that will lose you electoral votes in Florida. Social Security works, and has for a very long time. The possibility of payouts dropping 25% in decades if nothing is done isn't cause for alarm, it's cause for sensible debate and action.
That may mean supporting the right of an individual to choose whether to participate in Social Security, and instead charge them a minimum tax to fund public health care options available for all Americans. There's no way anyone from this generation will support privatizing social security into the stock market, since they have seen how fragile unregulated capitalism is.
There’s one big difference between me and the others—I won’t take every last dime of the surplus and spend it on tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy. I’ll use the bulk of the surplus to secure Social Security far into the future to keep our promise to the greatest generation. -McCain in 2000
I am concerned that repeal of the estate tax would provide massive benefits solely to the wealthiest and highest-income taxpayers in the country. A Treasury Department study found that almost no estate tax has been paid by lower- and middle-income taxpayers. But taxes have been paid on the estates of people who were in the highest 20% of the income distribution at the time of their death. It found that 91% of all estate taxes are paid by the estates of people whose annual income exceeded $190,000 around the time of their death.
“We have no idea what our financial or economic situation will be ten years from now. We may want to have the flexibility to provide significant tax relief for lower- and middle-income taxpayers. Other unforeseen issues may arise. The point is that we must think beyond the horizon. Making the repeal of the estate tax permanent fails to take these new circumstances into account.
it's not the GOP that's trying to shove ACTA down our throats and the Mandatory Hospitalization Suppository up our ass
Yeah. They just suspended habeas corpus, cut taxes for the wealthy while leading the country to war, and reduced corporate income tax rates for every corporation, not just "Hollywood" and insurance companies. I can see how draconian copyright laws and mandating health insurance and requiring insurance companies to pay out - the same way we mandate car insurance - can really get on your nerves.
I hold no loyalty to any political party, and I don't delude myself with visions of (D) fixing all of the problems. As far as extricating themselves from corporate influence, the GOP has zero chance, and the Democrats maybe one in five.
For some odd reason it excludes Social Security
People pay into social security, and then get money out. It has not cost the Federal Government any money in it's history. The disaster scenario you keep hearing about is that if no changes are made to the retirement age, due to the improvements in life expectancy, Social Security would only fund 75% of what is promised in 2020 or sometime thereafter.
Our analysis is based on federal funds, which do not include trust funds -- such as Social Security -- that are raised separately from income taxes for specific purposes.
As any good democratic socialist, I believe that people will eventually arrive at the truth. Fox is damming a flood of people asking questions, and hoping that they will stick to the script. Throw in a few dark horses like Ron Paul, who doesn't toe the line on the narrative Fox likes to present, and Fox is only ensuring that they will be completely washed out once the dam breaks.
The damage they are doing to our country in terms of the destruction of the middle class, our ability to manufacture our own goods, and our outright dependence on islamic fundamentalist states for our energy needs may end up catapulting the nation into a great period of misery. That's why I'm headed outside of the fallout line.
China is scooping up every bit of available raw resources, and we're patting ourselves on the back for innovations like facebook and the iPad and air conditioned seats. Rome will fall, but how hard and how fast is largely dependent on how long people continue to delude themselves.
Most voters don't know what rule of law is either. Look how many of them think the Constitution is just a piece of paper, and therefore Parliament can do whatever it wants.
He's an embedded reporter and former Green Beret. Not exactly someone who's going to be critical of the use of force in Afghanistan. It's the only reason he still gets to ride. Anyone real criticism will get you thrown off the program.
I just read his piece called "Girl With No Future."
Let's be frank. We must look at the situation and ask, "How far can we nudge this place by the year 2100?" Reasonably speaking -- let's take out the pencils -- how many generations are required to achieve even 80 percent literacy? If widespread literacy is a goal -- literacy should be a primary goal- - it's already too late for most of the youngsters who will be born in the next five years... If Afghanistan is to reach even the level of Nepal -- maybe we could do that in 25 years...
Yet we and our many allies must realize that this cake will not be baked in 10 years. Some British, at least, talk in terms of 10 more years. A key Japanese official in Afghanistan said to me that they are committed to 10, 20, maybe 30 years. It will take 100, but at least the Japanese are thinking straight, while most of us are not."
Looks like Yon has never heard of the Sandanistas. And I doubt he would suggest we try any similar approach. The literacy of Afghanis is probably secondary to victory in his mind.
A public policy, existing through the years, and derived from a profound knowledge of human characteristics and motives, has established a rule that demands of a corporate officer or director, peremptorily and inexorably, the most scrupulous observance of his duty, not only affirmatively to protect the interest of the corporation committed to his charge, but also to refrain from doing anything that would work injury to the corporation, or to deprive it of profit or advantage which his skill and ability might properly bring to it, or to enable it to make in the reasonable and lawful exercise of its powers.
There's also Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, but Many say that it's not useful law anymore, but I think that's because the primacy of shareholder wealth maximization has been internalized into corporate law and culture. Shareholders sue corporations all the time for not maximizing shareholder value. There seem to be no doubts about the primacy of this practice in the journals:
This essay, "In Defense of the Shareholder Wealth Maximization Norm, appeared in the Symposium on New Directions in Corporate Law published in volume 50 of the Washington & Lee Law Review. This essay was written as a reply to an article in the same symposium by Professor Ronald M. Green - "Shareholders as Stakeholders: Changing Metaphors of Corporate Governance," 50 Wash. & Lee. L. Rev. 1409 (1993) - in which Professor Green criticized the dominant view of corporate governance, according to which directors have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder wealth. In sharp contrast, this essay argues that the principle of shareholder wealth maximization is both a valid positive account of corporate law and also a legitimate normative proposition.
Directors and officers are obligated to maximize shareholder value. Shareholder value is largely perceived as the current stock price. Current stock price is largely based on the latest quarterly profit report. I think arguments to the contrary are rather naive.
Slashdot Mirror
Or we could have reasonable gun control laws. Cue the nutcases who think they're going to 1) have a reason to fight the US Army and 2) think they could possibly beat them.
Thanks NRA! Not only are you keeping our murder rate high, but you're also helping to kill Mexicans too.
And the assclowns complaining about assclowns.
Stupid Fland^H^H^H^H^H assclowns.
Slow down there, skipper. You're under the misapprehension that Pfizer exists to make pharmaceuticals. Pfizer exists to make profit with advertising, and they happen to sell pharmaceuticals.
Especially if you're a private military contractor in Iraq.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5xT1DGJMoQ
Yeah, it's a prepositional phrase. Grammar Becks are everywhere.
you can make a lot of money, but
See your preposition there? That's all anyone ever thinks about.
The world makes more sense now, doesn't it?
The only solution to the problem you mention is to strip search everyone, and that would be very time-consuming.
Or stop becoming involved in entangling alliances overseas for the short term benefits of cheap energy sources that have been ruining the region for decades. Unless you actually believe they hate us "for our freedom."
At the outset, the author draws several conceptual distinctions that are subsequently applied to the case-study at hand. He distinguishes between the "American national interest paradigm," according to which U.S. policy toward the Middle East is primarily determined by vital security interests and strategic preferences that American policy makers have sought to maintain and implement throughout the region (such as trying to resolve or stabilize the Arab-Israeli conflict, maintaining access to Arab oil, containing the Soviet Union), and the "special relationship" paradigm, according to which American policy toward Israel is mainly derived from "a broad cluster of predispositions, sentiments and attitudes toward Israel in American public opinion, which are permeated with sympathy, support and affection." ...
The author argues that between 1957 and 1960, a gradual shift occurred in the American policy toward the Middle East in general, and toward Israel in particular. Seeking to create a series of bilateral security arrangements with individual Middle Eastern states in response to regional crises that took place between 1957 and 1959, the Eisenhower administration no longer deemed an Arab-Israeli peace as a sine qua non for attaining Arab unity and support in the struggle against Communist expansionism. As a direct result of these changes, "the perception of Israel as a potential strategic asset to the United States came to increasingly permeate the cognitive map of Washington's policy makers." This shift became most vividly evident in July 1958, when Israel was called upon and agreed to permit a British and American airlift of strategic materials through Israeli airspace to prop up the embattled Jordanian monarchy that was being challenged by a radical nationalist uprising fomented by Egypt's Nasser. Ben-Zvi claims that "the 1958 Jordanian Crisis can be thought of as the 'trigger event,' which provided the impetus for completing the swing of the perceptual pendulum from Israel as a strategic liability and an impediment to American regional designs, to Israel as an indispensable asset to American and British strategic plans and objectives." These developments provide additional proof that the shift in the American strategy toward Israel in the late 1950s was due exclusively to external factors in the Middle East, and not to any lobbying activities by pro-Israeli organizations.
http://www.mepc.org/journal_vol6/rubner.html
Let me refer you to the god damned title of the story:
US Changes How Air Travelers Are Screened
I agree that it's security theater, but let me quote on of my favorite comments ever. The words, they MEAN things.
Hollywood doesn't push movies that actually suck. The plots may be generic, and made for mass appeal, but the truly awful releases are not previewed or advertised beyond what it takes to satisfy the egos that made the trash in the first place.
Transformers (I didn't see the second one) was a steaming pile of shit in terms of art, but it was an okay movie. Explosions. Sweaty young women. One dimensional characters. Sounds a lot like the James Bond flicks from the 60s, doesn't it?
It's been cheaper for a long time. But without an enemy image, there is no way to propagandize the population in order to suck a trillion dollars in war spending out of their wallets every year, and allow Lockheed and Boeing and Blackwater to take their 20% cut.
If the policy planners in washington had figured out that terrorism was more effective than communism at stoking hysteria and paranoia, we would probably have the same relationship with Russia as we do with China. The only downside is that they are unknowingly pushing distaste for religious fundamentalism, which may have a negative effect on their core voting bloc.
The Israelis have trained interrogators, who interview every single human being before they are granted entry into their country. The team is highly professional, and they constantly try to send through their own people with falsified documentation, and if there are any people who are not caught, everyone they passed is terminated from their position.
Forcing everyone to throw away their water and take off their shoes and get body scanned is a surefire way to give everyone a completely false sense of security. If I were a terrorist cell, I'd be applying all over America for airport jobs. Once you are hired and they know your name, and you are waved passed security, you begin stashing explosives for later retrieval by third parties who will walk right through security, pickup the package, and wink at the flight attendants as they take their seat.
And the real trick is that the next terrorist attack won't be on a plane. It will probably be a real nuke stashed in a port somewhere, since we don't even bother to check the trillions of pounds of cargo we import each year.
The Terrorists are often Brown People.
And when the terrorists find a disaffected white nutcase who wants to go down in history as the world's biggest terrorist, he'll walk right by the line of PhD students who are being strip searched for having the wrong skin color.
http://surfermag.com/features/onlineexclusives/sterling_spencer_gets_shacked_on_his_cell_phone/
You don't have to go with Google. I was just pointing out that an unencrypted laptop is vastly more insecure than hosting your e-mail at an ISP, with proper password policies and session timeouts.
The hysteria about cloud computing is just a sideshow to actual security concerns, like physical access, multiple layers of encryption, and the social engineering that usually negates the first two. And if you don't know that, I hope you aren't an IT consultant.
If you forced a login with a quick time out for all of those gmail accounts, that's a hell of a lot more secure than storing the documents on your laptop, which can be stolen and broken pretty easily. (These kids aren't going to password protect bootup and encrypt the hard drive. ) If you need an e-mail even if the internet is down, it should probably be in your notes in your word processor anyway. And unless you're not going to use WiFi, you are already sending your data over insecure connections.
And if you think other ISPs don't give up your data already... well, you're just not paying attention.
If you want to use and share data on the internet, there are risks. If you want to remember something that cannot possibly be intercepted by a third party, write it down on a piece of paper, put it in a safe, and hope no one steals the safe.
This is the kind of idiotic hyperbole that will lose you electoral votes in Florida. Social Security works, and has for a very long time. The possibility of payouts dropping 25% in decades if nothing is done isn't cause for alarm, it's cause for sensible debate and action.
That may mean supporting the right of an individual to choose whether to participate in Social Security, and instead charge them a minimum tax to fund public health care options available for all Americans. There's no way anyone from this generation will support privatizing social security into the stock market, since they have seen how fragile unregulated capitalism is.
There’s one big difference between me and the others—I won’t take every last dime of the surplus and spend it on tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy. I’ll use the bulk of the surplus to secure Social Security far into the future to keep our promise to the greatest generation. -McCain in 2000
I am concerned that repeal of the estate tax would provide massive benefits solely to the wealthiest and highest-income taxpayers in the country. A Treasury Department study found that almost no estate tax has been paid by lower- and middle-income taxpayers. But taxes have been paid on the estates of people who were in the highest 20% of the income distribution at the time of their death. It found that 91% of all estate taxes are paid by the estates of people whose annual income exceeded $190,000 around the time of their death.
“We have no idea what our financial or economic situation will be ten years from now. We may want to have the flexibility to provide significant tax relief for lower- and middle-income taxpayers. Other unforeseen issues may arise. The point is that we must think beyond the horizon. Making the repeal of the estate tax permanent fails to take these new circumstances into account.
-McCain in 2002.
it's not the GOP that's trying to shove ACTA down our throats and the Mandatory Hospitalization Suppository up our ass
Yeah. They just suspended habeas corpus, cut taxes for the wealthy while leading the country to war, and reduced corporate income tax rates for every corporation, not just "Hollywood" and insurance companies. I can see how draconian copyright laws and mandating health insurance and requiring insurance companies to pay out - the same way we mandate car insurance - can really get on your nerves.
I hold no loyalty to any political party, and I don't delude myself with visions of (D) fixing all of the problems. As far as extricating themselves from corporate influence, the GOP has zero chance, and the Democrats maybe one in five.
For some odd reason it excludes Social Security
People pay into social security, and then get money out. It has not cost the Federal Government any money in it's history. The disaster scenario you keep hearing about is that if no changes are made to the retirement age, due to the improvements in life expectancy, Social Security would only fund 75% of what is promised in 2020 or sometime thereafter.
Our analysis is based on federal funds, which do not include trust funds -- such as Social Security -- that are raised separately from income taxes for specific purposes.
http://www.warresisters.org/federalpiechart
I call BS on the story about commercial tax rates but I currently don't have the evidence to back up my claim.
Fixed that for you.
As any good democratic socialist, I believe that people will eventually arrive at the truth. Fox is damming a flood of people asking questions, and hoping that they will stick to the script. Throw in a few dark horses like Ron Paul, who doesn't toe the line on the narrative Fox likes to present, and Fox is only ensuring that they will be completely washed out once the dam breaks.
The damage they are doing to our country in terms of the destruction of the middle class, our ability to manufacture our own goods, and our outright dependence on islamic fundamentalist states for our energy needs may end up catapulting the nation into a great period of misery. That's why I'm headed outside of the fallout line.
China is scooping up every bit of available raw resources, and we're patting ourselves on the back for innovations like facebook and the iPad and air conditioned seats. Rome will fall, but how hard and how fast is largely dependent on how long people continue to delude themselves.
PS. Be careful - you could end up arguing for publicly financed, non-profit news sources.
Most voters don't know what rule of law is either. Look how many of them think the Constitution is just a piece of paper, and therefore Parliament can do whatever it wants.
The Tea Partiers seem to be stirring up some interest. If they ever discover the real cause of their tax burden and the reality of effective commercial tax rates, I'm afraid their loving relationship with the GOP and it's corporate outlets will quickly deteriorate.
>>>rule of law.
"What's that?" - leader
"No clue." - other leader
"Well, fuck off then." -voter in next election*
*only valid in literate and civically active cultures
He's an embedded reporter and former Green Beret. Not exactly someone who's going to be critical of the use of force in Afghanistan. It's the only reason he still gets to ride. Anyone real criticism will get you thrown off the program.
I just read his piece called "Girl With No Future."
Let's be frank. We must look at the situation and ask, "How far can we nudge this place by the year 2100?" Reasonably speaking -- let's take out the pencils -- how many generations are required to achieve even 80 percent literacy? If widespread literacy is a goal -- literacy should be a primary goal- - it's already too late for most of the youngsters who will be born in the next five years... If Afghanistan is to reach even the level of Nepal -- maybe we could do that in 25 years...
Yet we and our many allies must realize that this cake will not be baked in 10 years. Some British, at least, talk in terms of 10 more years. A key Japanese official in Afghanistan said to me that they are committed to 10, 20, maybe 30 years. It will take 100, but at least the Japanese are thinking straight, while most of us are not."
Looks like Yon has never heard of the Sandanistas. And I doubt he would suggest we try any similar approach. The literacy of Afghanis is probably secondary to victory in his mind.
A public policy, existing through the years, and derived from a profound knowledge of human characteristics and motives, has established a rule that demands of a corporate officer or director, peremptorily and inexorably, the most scrupulous observance of his duty, not only affirmatively to protect the interest of the corporation committed to his charge, but also to refrain from doing anything that would work injury to the corporation, or to deprive it of profit or advantage which his skill and ability might properly bring to it, or to enable it to make in the reasonable and lawful exercise of its powers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guth_v._Loft_Inc.
There's also Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, but Many say that it's not useful law anymore, but I think that's because the primacy of shareholder wealth maximization has been internalized into corporate law and culture. Shareholders sue corporations all the time for not maximizing shareholder value. There seem to be no doubts about the primacy of this practice in the journals:
This essay, "In Defense of the Shareholder Wealth Maximization Norm, appeared in the Symposium on New Directions in Corporate Law published in volume 50 of the Washington & Lee Law Review. This essay was written as a reply to an article in the same symposium by Professor Ronald M. Green - "Shareholders as Stakeholders: Changing Metaphors of Corporate Governance," 50 Wash. & Lee. L. Rev. 1409 (1993) - in which Professor Green criticized the dominant view of corporate governance, according to which directors have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder wealth. In sharp contrast, this essay argues that the principle of shareholder wealth maximization is both a valid positive account of corporate law and also a legitimate normative proposition.
link
Alas, I have no LexisNexis account.
Toyota shareholders sue over fallen stock price
Shareholders Sue the Pants Off Yahoo
Directors and officers are obligated to maximize shareholder value. Shareholder value is largely perceived as the current stock price. Current stock price is largely based on the latest quarterly profit report. I think arguments to the contrary are rather naive.
Saudia Arabia is in agreement with us. Hence, their expatriates operate out of Afghanistan and not Saudia Arabia.
If al Qaeda only operates in Afghanistan, I guess the war on terrorism should be over any day now.