They would do better to put the money into smaller "airstrip" size carriers (UK HMS Invincible) instead of the "airfields" (USS Nimitz, etc) they have. Use the carriers for SVTOL aircraft for providing support cover and light bombing while using the larger USA based bomber fleets for the strategic long range bombing.
Actually, we do have smaller carriers as well. The LHA and LHD classes are roughly the same size and carry a (smallish) wing of harriers and Chinooks. These will be replaced in the next 10 years with Ospreys and F-35's, which will give them an amazing amount of firepower with a fairly small footprint.
That being said, even the brits are backing off on the small deck idea as their newest Carrier that's just about to go into production is a big deck with two islands.
Very few people understand the pure detterant force that us a Navy Carrier Group tho. Imagine Hitler trying to take the Rhine if a full air wing with enough power to wipe the force off the map was hanging around. Carrier groups are not designed to be subltle, or designed to kill a lot of people. They are just reminders that we can reach out and touch someone if they start misbehaving (ie, China and Taiwan, North Korea and South Korea and Japan, etc).
Sorry to be a realist, but people have been misbeahving since the dawn of time. Sometimes the only thing that works to avoid violence is the threat that you will get beat up more then your opponent.
It's posts like this that make me want to abandon Slashdot after 5 years of faithfully following, commenting and posting stories. Let's set some things strait:
(before anyone accuses me of being Microsoft marketting, I have no links to the company, and am a huge fan in OpenSource. I have both a windows and a Linux box, and I spend more time hacking on Linux for fun, and hacking on.NET to get paid....)
1) Microsoft has completly committed to.NET. Longhorn's new features are all managed code.
2) Microsoft's most profitable Business Aplications are being ported as we speak. BizTalk, Office, and the OS all have managed serviced components now, and the next version of SQL will have extremly rich CLR support.
3)My experience as a Technologist is the reverse. We have gone from no.NET projects (all perl and Java) to four this year, and my guess is that we will see as many as six or seven next year (smallish shop).
4) The knowledge curve works for you. My experience is that in Assembly 10% of stuff is "easy" the rest you need to look up, in C, 40% of the stuff is easy, the rest you need to look up, in C++ it's about 50/50, in Java it's closer to 75/25. In C# on.NET, it's about 90/10. That last ten can be a bitch, but no less then Java's 25%.
5) Having strugled with AXIS and several other varients of Web Services for Java, I have to say, they pretty much suck rocks (GLUE excepted, although at least the last version I was playing with still equired source access to code to generate services). On the other hand, the extremly rich API and Metadata abilities in.NET make web services insanly simple (maybe to simple, new developers may use them too much).
6) Interoperability rocks in.NET. Not just platform (mono is doing a great job) but also interop based on the WS-I stack.
7) Java is at best a niche platform. When was the last time you saw any non server/specialized software written in Java? Of the top ten software software packages (Windows, Office, SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, SQL, Quicken, Quickbooks, TaxCut, Microsoft Money) how many of them are actually written in java? 0/10. Microsoft owns 90% of the CPU market. Microsoft has decided to slip.NET until Longhorn, but it is out there in the hands of extremly productive developers.
8).NET has only been released in a non beta form for about 1 year. Since then Microsoft has already done a major upgrade to the development platform, and a major release of the CLR. Whidby will add more features.
9) Reflection, Inspection, Attributes and Events. Simpler in.NET, more powerful in.NET.
10) ASP.net is a solid step up from ASP. Seperate of presentation and business logic is much more solid, the rendering pipeline is more powerfull, and the security features rock.
11) ADO.net makes simple database projects (CRUD) easy. Will anyone use Datasets for a large enterprise application? Probably not, but it is still there and powerful.
12) Sun fails the Dogfood test. Number of critical applications in Solaris that are or are being ported to Java? None, ask Sun why that is (not scalable, not fast). How much of Windows is being ported? The whole Shabang (see Longhorn). I will be happy to re-examine Java seriously for ongoing work when Sun's rm6 utilities (including the command lines) are written in Java.
13) Not only that, Sun is now lifting features from.NET, clearly there is some new and cool features here to get the ever slow sun to actually change their precious language.
14) Compact Framework. Share code between WinCE devices and your platform. Tie them together via Webservices with a single click of the mouse.
15) Rich clients. Have the interoperability and accessability of the web without stateless programming enviornment and pretty graphics.
In case you have missed the news this last week, that is exactly what is happening. The lowest 40% of American's on the Salary scale don't pay any taxes, the lowest 33% get money back, and now thanks to a "tax cut" cum "Welfare check" More will.
Except the white lie that no one is mentioning is that the US does this as a exception to protect industries long enough for consolidation. Europe currently subsidizes Airbus in violation of WTO, and taxes American goods in violation of WTO rules.
The farm subsizies that we passed are the smallest in the world, yet G.W gets bashed. Think partisanship has anything to do with it?
Why don't the government subsidize Micron instead of slapping a big tariff on the chips? Won't dent their budget much (compared to the farmer's subsidy) and will not cause a rise in DRAM price. Because it is illegal under the WTO and free trade rules (not that this has stopped Europe and Boeing, mind you)
David Boies (of Bush v. Gore, Microsoft, and Tobacco fame) appears to be the main Legal Guy Here. David Boeis first represented IBM when they did a few rounds in Antitrust w/ the US Gov. After that he worked for the Prosecution in US v. Microsoft. After that he left for greener pastures but was then called back for Bush v. Gore. David Boies is also currently representing Court TV. Boies apparently is generating some attention because he signed off on a internal audit of Tyco which is at the center of a $600 million dollar fraud investigation.
This guy has links to the Democratic Party up the wazoo and a huge history of epic battles. Just assuming that IBM will crush them is a bad bad idea.
As a reality check about Sun....
on
Sun's Last Stand
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Where is the "Eat your own dogfood" principle. Sun has put far too much energy into Java, and not nearly enough into staying competitive with Windows and Linux at a server level. Compare Microsoft who is porting all of their userland into managed mode with Sun who has not released any core component of Solaris in Java.
When Sun ships rm6 in Java and it works well, then maybe I will look at their technology with something other then a short critical glance.
Speaking as a political/history geek rather then as a Computer Geek, Expecting any sort of rational thought out of the governments and media in the middle east is a bit like the Quark Searches... You know it should exist, but it's damn hard to find.
I suggest picking up "Yanks", "Doughboys" or "The Myth of the Great War." Each book debunks your position. You first thesis is obviouslly incorrect since Russia/USSR pulled out of the war, and Germany still lost.
In addition, you also ignore the French Mutinies in 1916 and 1917 which only abated once the US joined.
Finally you only argue on the basis of the pure units. There were much more units that were "integrated" that either had american units attached or werre logisticly supplied. Once again, see the above works for references. W
True. Sales taxes are local only, so it's harder to get a handle on them.
From IRS statistics: Income Percentile Taxable Income Percent of Total U. S. Income Percent of Total taxes paid Top 1% $313,469 20.81% 37.42% Top 5% $128,336 35.3% 56.47% Top 10% $92,144 46.01% 67.33% Top 25% $55,225 67.15% 84.01% Top 50% $27,682 87.01% 96.09%
So the bottom 50% pay 3.81% of taxes in America. The bottom 40% pay nothing. (BTW, the 50% number is currently $55,225)
I read the Faithful Siege, and I disagree with his conclusions. The Western European forces prior to the battle of the buldge were even lower in manpower and morale then many of the eastern front soilders, and they managed a counter attack. If Rommel had gone to the USSR rather then to Normandy, the soviets would have gotten clocked.
As for production, just like in the US, most of that production was not forward deployed. On the other hand, lend lease equipment (which predated Stalingrad and America's entry into WWII) was. I remember talking to a WWII survivor who mentioned how unconfortable jeeps could be.
No, we do it to keep N. Korea from overruning the troops in South Korea in the "Tripwire". (Get the idea tha t if Korea ever decides to do anything in S. Korea, a lot of troops are going to die?)
Nothing except the dumping of subsidised Western food on their markets, that drives local farmers out of business. And the pressure to use GM crops whose terms of use prevent farmers from saving seed and replanting it next year.
Note to Europe. Please stop CAP immediatly. Also note on GM, at least if NPR is to be believed, GM increases output 10-25 fold. I garuntee that you would need to reseed before replanting with thoose seeds.
Nothing except AIDs rates affecting in some cases up to half the population, made far worse by short-sighted US policies that won't give money to any aid organisation that promotes birth control (so no condoms) and by grasping pharma companies that won't let them have cheap drugs.
Which is Bullshit. We choose the program that worked best in Africa so far, and emulated it. Go troll somewhere else please.
Nothing except Western governments that are happy to decry the use of repressive measures while selling those same repressive governments the tools of repression. (Saddam's chemical weapons were aquired with the help of the US government, after all. What did they think he'd do with them? Go fishing?)
Actually, most of thoose weapons were french, not American. Beyond that, they were given to him because Iran was threatining to use them.
Nothing except IMF- and World Bank-imposed policies that force governments to sign up to neo-liberal "austerity" packages that destroy their industries and leave them open to corporate takeovers by the West. (Take a look at economic history. You'll see that free-market countries like the US and Britain got rich through fiercely protective and anti-competitive policies. Only once they were economically dominant did they embrace free markets.)
After all, trade liberalization did nothing for Europe right? I mean it's not like all of the governments of Europe pre-WWI and WWII were brutal monarchies and dictatorships. It's not like Japan benefited at all from reform of their society post WWII correct? (Let's not forget who funded and trained Osama and his friends in the first place...America.)
once again, BS. No money ever moved from the CIA to the Islamic group that Bin Ladin was in. Certainly no money after Al qaeda was created. Please do yourself a favor and go read a decent book on Al Qaeda or the Taliban. I suggest "Taliban" or "Jihad.
We've found no evidence of either Who is this royal "we" who clearly is judge and adjudicator of this matter?
And those who claim it was about liberating the Iraqi people had better explain why the Iraqis needed liberating so much more than the Cubans, the Zimbabweans, the North Koreans etc.
They all need liberating, which is why we are not willing to compromise and back Il Jong's reign of terror, or lower the trade embargo with Cuba like Europe keeps deamanding.
Because of course, the Americans have to much money and should be punished for their suc... err.. greed.
First of all, we did not spend a similar amount on our war with Iraq. Last I heard from my senator, it was about 70bln in the end, well below proejections. Second, we fund the UN, NATO, WHO, WTO, WorldBank and IMF.
Finally your utopian argument that if the playing field was equal there would be no bad people who attack their neghboors has been utterly disproven by 300 years of history where the word "utopia" was always shortly followed by "crimes against humanity" (French Revolution, Comunes, Communism, Cultural Revolution).
Actually, we do (about 50% of the millitary Budget - 125 billion last I checked). Even more so, the vast majority (81.35%) of the overall budget is for social expenditures. (Bet you didn't know that the poorest 40% of people in America pay zero in taxes, and the poorest 30% get a check from the government each year).
I agree with your points, I disagree with some of your facts. Corel Sea (May 1942) was 5 monthes after pearl and it was a stratigic success (stopped a Japanese drive on Australia) even if it was a draw (both sides lost a carrier). Midway was less then a month later (they really scrabled to get the fleet back together) and was arguably the most important battle (and victory) in the Pacific war. Remember we faught both of these battles with old ships, equipment and planes.
I do agree with your points about the need to stay viggilent. I do think that Millitary expenditures will go down soon.
Yes, but in 1992, they were the third largest Army in the world, and we cleaned their clock. Milosivic had the best Air Defenses in the world, and we lost one stealth fighter to it. Afghanistan was the buriel spot of three different empires, and we defeated their government using local forces and less then 200 special forces.
Btw, we were outmanned, not the other way around. At no point in the war did American forces face a opposite division with less then a 2:1 advantage against them. At one point a general managed to stop the movement of a entire division using a single company of soilders.
Actually, the only time we had numerical suppority was when the 4th ID marched up to Tikrit. There was only a single division there against an American division.
Wrong. It was Soviets who defeated Germany. Anyone who claims otherwise doesn't know what they are talking about. Even after Normandy, about 70% of German troops were fighting the Soviets, and Soviets fought them ALOT longer than Americans did.
Uh. No. They did it with American Equipment, after the America units fighting in Europe bleed enough of Hitler's assets off to stage a break thru. Americans got to Germany and Berlin first, and we propped up the Soviet Government long enough for them to survive. Had America not entered the war and raised the spectre of a western front, Hitler would have taken Stalingrad or Moscow or the Oil fields. any one of thoose objectives falling would have ended the government. This might come as a shock to you, but the training of US troops is not superior to training of other armies
Really, because Janes, the Mossad, the Soviets and just about every different millitary expert agrees with you. In fact, the advantage that US troops has is all about training and very little about combat equipment.
Stupid things have been forced on us. For example, Clinton refused to let the Rangers use heavy armour in Bosnia (he must have been using them for the Branch Dividians) and bridges were put there for the local population. Clinton time after time constrained Millitary action (the same way as it was constrained in Vietnam) to make it completly ineffectual (for example, using Tomahawks instead of SEAL/SF teams to go after Bin Ladin after the Embassy bombings).
As much as some people would love to make it so, it is not a sin to be proud of your country. In America, what makes us a country is not clans or ethnic identity (unlike just about every other nation out there with the exception of China, Australia, etc, which also have so many minority groups they are pretty much in the same ballpark) but rather ideology. Our ideology is "Life, Liberty and the persuit of happiness" You threaten any of the above, we will go after you (esp Life and Liberty, persuit of happiness can be solved via prozac). In addition, we want you to enjoy Life Liberty and Happiness, because when you are happy, it makes it much less likely that you will go around and kill your neighboors.
There was a fascinating article in the newest foreign policy digest about the fact that America does not understand other people's nationalism (because we have never had clan or religous wars here) and they don't understand ours (because we are not homogenous). I think a big breakdown occurs here.
I am proud of what we did in Afghanistan, and things are looking up now that Karzai can put Dostum and the other warlords in their place. Afghanistan is about the first time someone has been "bombed out of the stone age" but I don't suspect it will be the last. As for Iraq, I fully hope that there is a sane government in there by the end of the year. Loosing the peace is one thing, but would keeping the peace and forcing Chalabi to be leader by intervention be any better? Democracy is a messy process.
Finally, you seem to think that your current tainted view of the world will be what historians write. History is not written by the partisans, but by the events. Your view is just a single view on this subject (as is mine).
Remember that Al Qaeda is our own fault. Osama bin Laden was trained by the CIA to fight the "atheistic Commies." We were the ones that gave them the weapons and the money to fight the USSR.
FOR THE LAST BLOODY TIME. We never trained OBL or anyone in Al Qaeda. The American money was re-funneled by the ISI, but it was primarily funneled to groups that later formed the Northern Alliance, not Al Qaeda. Read up on any decent book on the subject ("Taliban" or "Jihad" probably being the best) if you want to know more about this.
In Iran, we gave one group of extremists to fight another group of extremists, and guess what, we had more extremists put into government that would later turn on us. Iraq is also partially our own fault. When Iran turned on us, we decided that its neighboring opponent, Iraq, could do all our dirty work (by giving them money and weapons), especially since they were already fighting.
Close. If you look at the actual though in Dept. Of State it was "Maybe they will both club each other out of stupidity." We did provide some aid to Iraq, but the vast majority was provided by:
France
Russia
Germany
Surprised? In fact, America probably provided no more then 100 million dollars, compared to the billions that the former nations put in. See http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe =UTF-8&q=Iraq+Russia+France+%22military+aid+to+Ira q%22 for more information. Remember that France even went so far as to build a reactor for Hussein giving him access to Nuclear Science.
Oh, and what about the Philippines, a former colony of the US? That too was liberated after WWII, but it's still steeped in considerable poverty. Trust me, I've been there and seen it myself. I was shocked and I knew that wasn't even the worst as far as impoverished nations go. It was still very heartbreaking. It's now improving, but at a very, very slow rate.
Yep, the second we pulled out their standard of living plunged. Think it's a coincidence? Western Europe still had a lot of money in the banks after WWII, which really helped them to bounce back.
Uh. No. As a matter of fact, Germany was still paying reperations to England and Co before WWII. England was still paying America reperations during WWII (the finished up paying WWI debt, AFAIK the vast majority of WWII debt was "forgiven" as part of the marshall plan. England in particular went thru a gut wrenching series of budgets for 20 years after WWII to recover.
Really? China has been ambitously building up for a while and has Taiwan ringed with GPS guided smart missles. Kim Jong Il is threating Seoul with nukes and artillary. Hussein was threatining Saudi Arabia and Quwait.
China is vastly under reporting their millitary expendeture (about 70-100 billion) and they have only one sea to defend (not three like the US).
As a non-American, if you live in the following places, America garuntees your soverignty:
Western Europe (NATO)
Eastern Europe (NATO and Coalition action in the Balkans)
Middle East
South America (even from the days of the Monroe Doctrine)
Japan, Taiwan, Australia.
If you live in India, Pakistan, Indoensia,Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Isreal, France, UK, Former USSR state, South Africa America keeps your neighbors from doing anything bad to you.
We also provide half of the UN's budget each year, and 70% of the peacekeeping forces over the last 10 years.
Oh yeah, and NATO and the US checked the ambition of the USSR (Yes, Europe, now you too could have been earning 76 dollars per capita yearly wage in 1982). In addition, American power ended two world wars, and prevented a third that was threatining between the UK and the US in the middle of the 1920/30's.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, just like the religous "fundamentalists" who founded the United States in the first place as a secular democracy (the first in the world).
Please don't make broad generalizations like this, it just trolls the AC's.
They would do better to put the money into smaller "airstrip" size carriers (UK HMS Invincible) instead of the "airfields" (USS Nimitz, etc) they have. Use the carriers for SVTOL aircraft for providing support cover and light bombing while using the larger USA based bomber fleets for the strategic long range bombing.
Actually, we do have smaller carriers as well. The LHA and LHD classes are roughly the same size and carry a (smallish) wing of harriers and Chinooks. These will be replaced in the next 10 years with Ospreys and F-35's, which will give them an amazing amount of firepower with a fairly small footprint.
That being said, even the brits are backing off on the small deck idea as their newest Carrier that's just about to go into production is a big deck with two islands.
Very few people understand the pure detterant force that us a Navy Carrier Group tho. Imagine Hitler trying to take the Rhine if a full air wing with enough power to wipe the force off the map was hanging around. Carrier groups are not designed to be subltle, or designed to kill a lot of people. They are just reminders that we can reach out and touch someone if they start misbehaving (ie, China and Taiwan, North Korea and South Korea and Japan, etc).
Sorry to be a realist, but people have been misbeahving since the dawn of time. Sometimes the only thing that works to avoid violence is the threat that you will get beat up more then your opponent.
It's posts like this that make me want to abandon Slashdot after 5 years of faithfully following, commenting and posting stories. Let's set some things strait:
.NET to get paid....)
.NET. Longhorn's new features are all managed code.
.NET projects (all perl and Java) to four this year, and my guess is that we will see as many as six or seven next year (smallish shop).
.NET, it's about 90/10. That last ten can be a bitch, but no less then Java's 25%.
.NET make web services insanly simple (maybe to simple, new developers may use them too much).
.NET. Not just platform (mono is doing a great job) but also interop based on the WS-I stack.
.NET until Longhorn, but it is out there in the hands of extremly productive developers.
.NET has only been released in a non beta form for about 1 year. Since then Microsoft has already done a major upgrade to the development platform, and a major release of the CLR. Whidby will add more features.
.NET, more powerful in .NET.
.NET, clearly there is some new and cool features here to get the ever slow sun to actually change their precious language.
(before anyone accuses me of being Microsoft marketting, I have no links to the company, and am a huge fan in OpenSource. I have both a windows and a Linux box, and I spend more time hacking on Linux for fun, and hacking on
1) Microsoft has completly committed to
2) Microsoft's most profitable Business Aplications are being ported as we speak. BizTalk, Office, and the OS all have managed serviced components now, and the next version of SQL will have extremly rich CLR support.
3)My experience as a Technologist is the reverse. We have gone from no
4) The knowledge curve works for you. My experience is that in Assembly 10% of stuff is "easy" the rest you need to look up, in C, 40% of the stuff is easy, the rest you need to look up, in C++ it's about 50/50, in Java it's closer to 75/25. In C# on
5) Having strugled with AXIS and several other varients of Web Services for Java, I have to say, they pretty much suck rocks (GLUE excepted, although at least the last version I was playing with still equired source access to code to generate services). On the other hand, the extremly rich API and Metadata abilities in
6) Interoperability rocks in
7) Java is at best a niche platform. When was the last time you saw any non server/specialized software written in Java? Of the top ten software software packages (Windows, Office, SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, SQL, Quicken, Quickbooks, TaxCut, Microsoft Money) how many of them are actually written in java? 0/10. Microsoft owns 90% of the CPU market. Microsoft has decided to slip
8)
9) Reflection, Inspection, Attributes and Events. Simpler in
10) ASP.net is a solid step up from ASP. Seperate of presentation and business logic is much more solid, the rendering pipeline is more powerfull, and the security features rock.
11) ADO.net makes simple database projects (CRUD) easy. Will anyone use Datasets for a large enterprise application? Probably not, but it is still there and powerful.
12) Sun fails the Dogfood test. Number of critical applications in Solaris that are or are being ported to Java? None, ask Sun why that is (not scalable, not fast). How much of Windows is being ported? The whole Shabang (see Longhorn). I will be happy to re-examine Java seriously for ongoing work when Sun's rm6 utilities (including the command lines) are written in Java.
13) Not only that, Sun is now lifting features from
14) Compact Framework. Share code between WinCE devices and your platform. Tie them together via Webservices with a single click of the mouse.
15) Rich clients. Have the interoperability and accessability of the web without stateless programming enviornment and pretty graphics.
16) Integrati
In case you have missed the news this last week, that is exactly what is happening. The lowest 40% of American's on the Salary scale don't pay any taxes, the lowest 33% get money back, and now thanks to a "tax cut" cum "Welfare check" More will.
Except the white lie that no one is mentioning is that the US does this as a exception to protect industries long enough for consolidation. Europe currently subsidizes Airbus in violation of WTO, and taxes American goods in violation of WTO rules.
The farm subsizies that we passed are the smallest in the world, yet G.W gets bashed. Think partisanship has anything to do with it?
Why don't the government subsidize Micron instead of slapping a big tariff on the chips? Won't dent their budget much (compared to the farmer's subsidy) and will not cause a rise in DRAM price. Because it is illegal under the WTO and free trade rules (not that this has stopped Europe and Boeing, mind you)
David Boies (of Bush v. Gore, Microsoft, and Tobacco fame) appears to be the main Legal Guy Here. David Boeis first represented IBM when they did a few rounds in Antitrust w/ the US Gov. After that he worked for the Prosecution in US v. Microsoft. After that he left for greener pastures but was then called back for Bush v. Gore. David Boies is also currently representing Court TV. Boies apparently is generating some attention because he signed off on a internal audit of Tyco which is at the center of a $600 million dollar fraud investigation.
This guy has links to the Democratic Party up the wazoo and a huge history of epic battles. Just assuming that IBM will crush them is a bad bad idea.
Where is the "Eat your own dogfood" principle. Sun has put far too much energy into Java, and not nearly enough into staying competitive with Windows and Linux at a server level. Compare Microsoft who is porting all of their userland into managed mode with Sun who has not released any core component of Solaris in Java.
When Sun ships rm6 in Java and it works well, then maybe I will look at their technology with something other then a short critical glance.
Movie adaptation(A Knight without a Horse) of the Procotols of the Elders of Zion.
Speaking as a political/history geek rather then as a Computer Geek, Expecting any sort of rational thought out of the governments and media in the middle east is a bit like the Quark Searches... You know it should exist, but it's damn hard to find.
I suggest picking up "Yanks", "Doughboys" or "The Myth of the Great War." Each book debunks your position. You first thesis is obviouslly incorrect since Russia/USSR pulled out of the war, and Germany still lost.
In addition, you also ignore the French Mutinies in 1916 and 1917 which only abated once the US joined.
Finally you only argue on the basis of the pure units. There were much more units that were "integrated" that either had american units attached or werre logisticly supplied. Once again, see the above works for references. W
Yeah, just go look at the IRS, Cato or CFG numbers. Also just do a google search for "10% taxes"
True. Sales taxes are local only, so it's harder to get a handle on them.
From IRS statistics:
Income
Percentile Taxable
Income Percent of Total
U. S. Income Percent of Total
taxes paid
Top 1% $313,469 20.81% 37.42%
Top 5% $128,336 35.3% 56.47%
Top 10% $92,144 46.01% 67.33%
Top 25% $55,225 67.15% 84.01%
Top 50% $27,682 87.01% 96.09%
So the bottom 50% pay 3.81% of taxes in America. The bottom 40% pay nothing. (BTW, the 50% number is currently $55,225)
I read the Faithful Siege, and I disagree with his conclusions. The Western European forces prior to the battle of the buldge were even lower in manpower and morale then many of the eastern front soilders, and they managed a counter attack. If Rommel had gone to the USSR rather then to Normandy, the soviets would have gotten clocked.
As for production, just like in the US, most of that production was not forward deployed. On the other hand, lend lease equipment (which predated Stalingrad and America's entry into WWII) was. I remember talking to a WWII survivor who mentioned how unconfortable jeeps could be.
No, we do it to keep N. Korea from overruning the troops in South Korea in the "Tripwire". (Get the idea tha t if Korea ever decides to do anything in S. Korea, a lot of troops are going to die?)
They are looking at a few different options. The best (IMHO) is fuel cells (which I want to see anyways).
Nothing except the dumping of subsidised Western food on their markets, that drives local farmers out of business. And the pressure to use GM crops whose terms of use prevent farmers from saving seed and replanting it next year.
Note to Europe. Please stop CAP immediatly. Also note on GM, at least if NPR is to be believed, GM increases output 10-25 fold. I garuntee that you would need to reseed before replanting with thoose seeds.
Nothing except AIDs rates affecting in some cases up to half the population, made far worse by short-sighted US policies that won't give money to any aid organisation that promotes birth control (so no condoms) and by grasping pharma companies that won't let them have cheap drugs.
Which is Bullshit. We choose the program that worked best in Africa so far, and emulated it. Go troll somewhere else please.
Nothing except Western governments that are happy to decry the use of repressive measures while selling those same repressive governments the tools of repression. (Saddam's chemical weapons were aquired with the help of the US government, after all. What did they think he'd do with them? Go fishing?)
Actually, most of thoose weapons were french, not American. Beyond that, they were given to him because Iran was threatining to use them.
Nothing except IMF- and World Bank-imposed policies that force governments to sign up to neo-liberal "austerity" packages that destroy their industries and leave them open to corporate takeovers by the West. (Take a look at economic history. You'll see that free-market countries like the US and Britain got rich through fiercely protective and anti-competitive policies. Only once they were economically dominant did they embrace free markets.)
After all, trade liberalization did nothing for Europe right? I mean it's not like all of the governments of Europe pre-WWI and WWII were brutal monarchies and dictatorships. It's not like Japan benefited at all from reform of their society post WWII correct?
(Let's not forget who funded and trained Osama and his friends in the first place...America.)
once again, BS. No money ever moved from the CIA to the Islamic group that Bin Ladin was in. Certainly no money after Al qaeda was created. Please do yourself a favor and go read a decent book on Al Qaeda or the Taliban. I suggest "Taliban" or "Jihad.
We've found no evidence of either Who is this royal "we" who clearly is judge and adjudicator of this matter?
And those who claim it was about liberating the Iraqi people had better explain why the Iraqis needed liberating so much more than the Cubans, the Zimbabweans, the North Koreans etc.
They all need liberating, which is why we are not willing to compromise and back Il Jong's reign of terror, or lower the trade embargo with Cuba like Europe keeps deamanding.
Because of course, the Americans have to much money and should be punished for their suc... err.. greed.
First of all, we did not spend a similar amount on our war with Iraq. Last I heard from my senator, it was about 70bln in the end, well below proejections. Second, we fund the UN, NATO, WHO, WTO, WorldBank and IMF.
Finally your utopian argument that if the playing field was equal there would be no bad people who attack their neghboors has been utterly disproven by 300 years of history where the word "utopia" was always shortly followed by "crimes against humanity" (French Revolution, Comunes, Communism, Cultural Revolution).
Actually, we do (about 50% of the millitary Budget - 125 billion last I checked). Even more so, the vast majority (81.35%) of the overall budget is for social expenditures. (Bet you didn't know that the poorest 40% of people in America pay zero in taxes, and the poorest 30% get a check from the government each year).
I agree with your points, I disagree with some of your facts. Corel Sea (May 1942) was 5 monthes after pearl and it was a stratigic success (stopped a Japanese drive on Australia) even if it was a draw (both sides lost a carrier). Midway was less then a month later (they really scrabled to get the fleet back together) and was arguably the most important battle (and victory) in the Pacific war. Remember we faught both of these battles with old ships, equipment and planes.
I do agree with your points about the need to stay viggilent. I do think that Millitary expenditures will go down soon.
Yes, but in 1992, they were the third largest Army in the world, and we cleaned their clock. Milosivic had the best Air Defenses in the world, and we lost one stealth fighter to it. Afghanistan was the buriel spot of three different empires, and we defeated their government using local forces and less then 200 special forces.
Btw, we were outmanned, not the other way around. At no point in the war did American forces face a opposite division with less then a 2:1 advantage against them. At one point a general managed to stop the movement of a entire division using a single company of soilders.
Actually, the only time we had numerical suppority was when the 4th ID marched up to Tikrit. There was only a single division there against an American division.
Wrong. It was Soviets who defeated Germany. Anyone who claims otherwise doesn't know what they are talking about. Even after Normandy, about 70% of German troops were fighting the Soviets, and Soviets fought them ALOT longer than Americans did.
Uh. No. They did it with American Equipment, after the America units fighting in Europe bleed enough of Hitler's assets off to stage a break thru. Americans got to Germany and Berlin first, and we propped up the Soviet Government long enough for them to survive. Had America not entered the war and raised the spectre of a western front, Hitler would have taken Stalingrad or Moscow or the Oil fields. any one of thoose objectives falling would have ended the government.
This might come as a shock to you, but the training of US troops is not superior to training of other armies
Really, because Janes, the Mossad, the Soviets and just about every different millitary expert agrees with you. In fact, the advantage that US troops has is all about training and very little about combat equipment.
Stupid things have been forced on us. For example, Clinton refused to let the Rangers use heavy armour in Bosnia (he must have been using them for the Branch Dividians) and bridges were put there for the local population. Clinton time after time constrained Millitary action (the same way as it was constrained in Vietnam) to make it completly ineffectual (for example, using Tomahawks instead of SEAL/SF teams to go after Bin Ladin after the Embassy bombings).
As much as some people would love to make it so, it is not a sin to be proud of your country. In America, what makes us a country is not clans or ethnic identity (unlike just about every other nation out there with the exception of China, Australia, etc, which also have so many minority groups they are pretty much in the same ballpark) but rather ideology. Our ideology is "Life, Liberty and the persuit of happiness" You threaten any of the above, we will go after you (esp Life and Liberty, persuit of happiness can be solved via prozac). In addition, we want you to enjoy Life Liberty and Happiness, because when you are happy, it makes it much less likely that you will go around and kill your neighboors.
There was a fascinating article in the newest foreign policy digest about the fact that America does not understand other people's nationalism (because we have never had clan or religous wars here) and they don't understand ours (because we are not homogenous). I think a big breakdown occurs here.
I am proud of what we did in Afghanistan, and things are looking up now that Karzai can put Dostum and the other warlords in their place. Afghanistan is about the first time someone has been "bombed out of the stone age" but I don't suspect it will be the last. As for Iraq, I fully hope that there is a sane government in there by the end of the year. Loosing the peace is one thing, but would keeping the peace and forcing Chalabi to be leader by intervention be any better? Democracy is a messy process.
Finally, you seem to think that your current tainted view of the world will be what historians write. History is not written by the partisans, but by the events. Your view is just a single view on this subject (as is mine).
Remember that Al Qaeda is our own fault. Osama bin Laden was trained by the CIA to fight the "atheistic Commies." We were the ones that gave them the weapons and the money to fight the USSR.
FOR THE LAST BLOODY TIME. We never trained OBL or anyone in Al Qaeda. The American money was re-funneled by the ISI, but it was primarily funneled to groups that later formed the Northern Alliance, not Al Qaeda. Read up on any decent book on the subject ("Taliban" or "Jihad" probably being the best) if you want to know more about this.
In Iran, we gave one group of extremists to fight another group of extremists, and guess what, we had more extremists put into government that would later turn on us. Iraq is also partially our own fault. When Iran turned on us, we decided that its neighboring opponent, Iraq, could do all our dirty work (by giving them money and weapons), especially since they were already fighting.
Close. If you look at the actual though in Dept. Of State it was "Maybe they will both club each other out of stupidity." We did provide some aid to Iraq, but the vast majority was provided by:
France
Russia
Germany
e =UTF-8&q=Iraq+Russia+France+%22military+aid+to+Ira q%22 for more information. Remember that France even went so far as to build a reactor for Hussein giving him access to Nuclear Science.
Surprised? In fact, America probably provided no more then 100 million dollars, compared to the billions that the former nations put in. See http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&o
Oh, and what about the Philippines, a former colony of the US? That too was liberated after WWII, but it's still steeped in considerable poverty. Trust me, I've been there and seen it myself. I was shocked and I knew that wasn't even the worst as far as impoverished nations go. It was still very heartbreaking. It's now improving, but at a very, very slow rate.
Yep, the second we pulled out their standard of living plunged. Think it's a coincidence?
Western Europe still had a lot of money in the banks after WWII, which really helped them to bounce back.
Uh. No. As a matter of fact, Germany was still paying reperations to England and Co before WWII. England was still paying America reperations during WWII (the finished up paying WWI debt, AFAIK the vast majority of WWII debt was "forgiven" as part of the marshall plan. England in particular went thru a gut wrenching series of budgets for 20 years after WWII to recover.
China is vastly under reporting their millitary expendeture (about 70-100 billion) and they have only one sea to defend (not three like the US).
As a non-American, if you live in the following places, America garuntees your soverignty:
Western Europe (NATO)
Eastern Europe (NATO and Coalition action in the Balkans)
Middle East
South America (even from the days of the Monroe Doctrine)
Japan, Taiwan, Australia.
If you live in India, Pakistan, Indoensia,Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Isreal, France, UK, Former USSR state, South Africa America keeps your neighbors from doing anything bad to you.
We also provide half of the UN's budget each year, and 70% of the peacekeeping forces over the last 10 years.
Oh yeah, and NATO and the US checked the ambition of the USSR (Yes, Europe, now you too could have been earning 76 dollars per capita yearly wage in 1982). In addition, American power ended two world wars, and prevented a third that was threatining between the UK and the US in the middle of the 1920/30's.
Welcome to Pax Americana. Peace on Prozac.