Clearly you haven't looked very far. Windows has crept into all kinds of application that would make you think "WHAT!!!??? Who authorized this!!!???" Just a few off the top of my head include trains, cranes and ships. In any case here's a list of the 10 worst uses for Windows and they range from the silly to the life threatening. Like I'm sure you'd be all warm and fuzzy knowing that the radiation machine measuring your near lethal dose of gamma rays is running vista and hooked up to a network. Good luck with that...
I think the answer is to create communities based on common cause. Social experiments with clear measures and means to communicate with one another. Clearly this mess is failing. Work together to build better, smarter, more sustainable human systems based in honoring the dignity of people and committed to empowering an ethical society where accountability and integrity are inherent aspects of being a citizen.
Provide wide latitude for beliefs and points of view, embrace diversity. Test social theories, discard failures dispassionately. Test, test, test. Design a new kind of society and perhaps it will inspire a new kind of person. One who courageously pursues life for the joy of living. One who knows who they owe and how to pay their debts. A society that honors all, but holds them to account. One that embraces, and empowers, and exhaults being human and drives it citizens to be the best possible expressions of themselves. Where honesty is a given. Where abuse and violence are dealt with justice both swift and compassionate. A society that relates to other societies with brotherhood and generosity, but doesn't give in to aggression or lawlessness.
I've never heard of such a place, but I want to build with all my heart.
The problem is that the neocon isn't a true conservative. (S)he is a someone co-opted from a population who's social and religious views trump all other ways of thinking. They've been co-opted by a cynical corporate based political party pandering to their love of "Family Values" and their fear of change and technology. The saddest and most ironic thing is that the worse things get, and the more devastating the changes, the harder they hang onto the ideology and the party responsible. Literally, drowning people hanging onto a boat anchor.
By the way, if by this description you think, I find the party that calls itself Democratic, any more palatable, you would be sadly mistaken. American politics has been an accelerating race to the bottom for so long, what's left is barely fit for human consumption.
There are two responses to this... the first being taking a comment out of context is a no-no, the conversations were fair and founded on the population growing without incredible gains in global support and technology. Ta-da, both things showed up.
Second, we now have 7,000,000,000 people and a third go to bed hungry. Where full on starvation is just a terrible problem in developing nations, severe malnutrition is a full on crisis.
Again, a fair description of the trend, an issue addressed over 40 years, and we are where we are. How does any of that have to do with GW? The men in the 70s were perfectly correct from their position and ultimately were part of a process that saved billions of lives. You know, things like thr "Green Revolution"? Wise people now warn you that you're driving full out towards a cliff, your response is to say "I stopped at that last sign they to me to and nothing happened, I think I'll gun it this time?" Okay, but the people warning aren't the problem... just a hint.
Yeah and Newton was a god in his time but it didn't stop him from trying to create the "Sorcerer's Stone". How does any of this have anything to do with the conversation at hand?
A lot of people have opinions... Einstein said "God doesn't play dice with the universe." People are wrong all the time. That's why we listen to theories after they've proven themselves. Your argument is specious and unless you can come up with a single case where a body of researchers with a widely accepted theory were proven wrong by some new overwhelming discovery, then all your saying is that just because you're a scientist doesn't make your opinions any better than anyone else's and nobody is arguing that.
We are saying science, not scientists, provides compelling explanations regarding the nature of the universe and that GW is accepted by most informed people as fact, verging on irrefutable fact.
Alright, let's try this instead. The body of evidence is now so ridiculously overwhelming, and comes from so many different disciplines and so many different schools of thought and so many different countries and so many different points of view that the big issues are presumed by most researchers as scientific fact. The same way we presume Relativity, Evolution, Newtonian Mechanics, Chemistry, Biology and Genetics. By all means, we make new discoveries by the hour, but these things add wrinkles to and shade nuances of existing frameworks of existing thought. They simply don't overturn large scientific frameworks for which there is such a tremendous body of evidence, and so much success in making predictions.
Holding out belief on the hope that at the last minute some impossible new truth that nobody ever considered is going to overturn millions of person-hours of research and analysis, is at best magical thinking. At worst its devoting yourself to a belief system in the face of physical reality... and that is simple self deception. Not evil, in fact we probably all have areas that we live in hope over. It just doesn't have any rational basis and shouldn't be compared to rational thinking.
I'm sorry but you seem to be the one with a profound lack of information. First there is a tremendous amount of work being done on alternative energy including huge recent breakthroughs in Solar (we are quick approaching the $0.50 per watt area and will surpass oil in unit cost per watt by end of year or early next.) This is critical when you consider the high probability that the $3 gallon of gasoline has gone the way of the dodo, and the $4 gallon is probably close behind it. We are making headway on every front, geothermal, wind, ocean/tidal, bio and synfuels and new advanced nuclear (including micro-reactors, pebble bed, helium fail proof systems and safe fast breeding.) Most important of all, is the incredible reduction in need without ever building a single new reactor by improving global efficiency. The simple fact is that if you take all these things together we are in great shape, can meet or exceed the carbon reductions without so much as an iota of change in the quality of life for anyone save the fossil fuel companies. They sadly would hurt a lot. The rest of us however would be doing remarkably well. More important, we could help the developing world bypass our mistakes and help usher in an era of human satisfaction and abundance never before seen.
As for water rising 10 feet... by when are you talking about? Then what about the next 10, and the 10 after that, and that, and that? Kiss Florida good-bye, highest point is 42 feet. Kiss the entire Mississippi delta (including New Orleans and Baton Rougue) good-bye. Kiss Florence, Italy, London, England, Hong Kong, China and Tokyo, all good-bye. In fact 6 out of 10 critical ports in the world would be inundated or so impacted by rising seas that they would for all intents and purposes be destroyed. Kiss entire nations like Bangladesh good-bye. Where do you suggest they go? I'm certain India would be overjoyed to take in an entire nation of bitterly poor and starving refugees. There are islands all over the world which are threatened, and many that will cease to be habitable. You suggest they move inland, just for grins and giggles what would the logistics of moving a billion people be like? Who's going to absorb these newly homeless people? How do you suggest we pay for this?
Oh, and the conversation about stabilization. That would presume we were sitting on our collective hands watching the world suck and doing absolutely nothing about it. We have plenty of use for carbon. If nothing else it looks like graphene is going to change the world. Just this week, there were half a dozen articles on breakthrough processes to sequester carbon and turn it into fuel, turn it into energy and convert into new and interesting substances with vital economic importance in a technological society. The coolest part is that most of these technologies use bacteria, algae, and other lifeforms to fix carbon.
Before voicing an opinion or regurgitating someone else's, please bother to find out is it holds any water.
Artrage or Corel Painter Essentials are two very reasonable programs that allow you to take photos and convert them into really lovely paintings that look spectacular on canvas. In fact if you want to go a step further, you can print them in any of a number of styles including chalk, pastel, pencil, ink, oil, acrylic or watercolor, and for the paint types you can spray the work with fixative and then apply a layer of transparent gouache which can be painted with a brush leaving real brush strokes and paint texture. Add a few highlights with real acrylic, and the effect is shockingly good.
For a quick thing anybody can do as an inexpensive project, these works are highly prized gifts and touch people surprisingly deep.
To all you young people!!! At the moment of graduation, get about 20 copies of your transcript, Post one on your Social Network page. Send another to a public notary and have the legitimate document publicly recorded. In short, remove the University from the equation. Take back what is yours, and hold it tight. Greedy minds and hearts will rob you at the first opportunity.
The problem is that you are living in a fairy tale of the past. Millions of people have been displaced by cheap labor pouring in on HB-1 visas, and that piece of paper may very soon be the only way to attain a job that isn't flipping burgers for a person of voting age. The world is a darker place than when you were born and the fact that you already have experience not withstanding, trying to make it, let alone get ahead for young people coming out of school is bugger-all hard and get harder by the minute. Show some compassion and sympathy for those who have hurdles to leap that you never had, and won't if you are the least bit lucky.
We are being squeezed by uncaring interests, from all sides, more and more, and its easy to blame others for not being responsible, but it doesn't take much of a hiccup any more to find yourself out in the cold and with a bank account that looks like Mother Hubbards Cupboard. Your personal comfort is not the measure of fairness in a society, and as the wealth continues to fly out of the middle class in this "Trickle !-Down Economy", you should be very careful for whom the bell tolls.
Yes but using your example. Its like that good friend went to the car dealer and said, here's $500 to prevent the transfer of ownership until I get paid back in full, and then bribed a local official to make the whole thing legal. This is nasty, unethical and injurious to the entire system of producing educated young people to staff positions of research, operation and management of our nation's enterprises.
It is also one more link in a growing chain of financial slavery begin forged by our institutions of finance. If we have any hope of taking back our freedom, we best act now while there is some small bit of access left in our government.
The problem isn't that schools are being forced. They may or may not. The problem is that they are being paid to hold you hostage. So now our houses of higher education are just another link, forged into a monolithic financial machine the buys and sells people from the moment they are legal entities until the last of their worldly assets are probated into government hands.
You are absolutely right about the power of government to hold sway over schools, but look who is being served. The banks are the winners here. The students the victims of predatory institutions. Don't go to school, flip burgers and starve. Go to school, get a degree, spend years flipping burgers and maybe get a real job, and spend the next 20 to 30 years paying off a bank, and the interest rates are about to double (and how long before student loans look like credit card debt.) Bought and sold. You are walking, talking bank accounts, and your rights as a human being end with the service contract you sign with the people who own you. This is an inhumane use of human beings and those that profit do so at the expense of humanity and its future development. The time to stop this insanity has long passed. If we are to preserve any semblance of human dignity, its time to end the insanity and take our lives back. Personally I say "To hell with the banks.!"
Wow, Central planners and elite comrades... This is not Soviet Russia. Have you a single wit of proof that anybody in government is getting wealthy on your tax dollars. Don't get me wrong, they're well paid, but the wealthy ones are getting wealthy because they're whores for corporate interests which is where the true wealth lies. As for increasingly draconian crackdowns on civil rights and the accelerating erosion of the Bill of Rights, please look around and see who's being served and who's paying for service.
There are critical social services to a free and functioning society which should be not for profit. Hospitals, Schools, Libraries and a source of Free Information unaffiliated by ownership or political influence. Healthcare shouldn't be the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in a country. Education shouldn't cost a young person their financial future. Libraries are a vital part of providing not just free information, but the education of young people on hungering for knowledge and truth. A public system for providing information which is untainted by political or private interest is the strongest safeguard against the enemies of freedom.
There should be a reliable, social net to keep the poorest and weakest from death and starvation, and help this generation of children to escape poverty. During the 60s, we had the kind of poverty for which a nation as rich as ours should be profoundly ashamed. The Republicans today, are arguing that we need to balance the budget on the heads of our poorest, sickest, eldest citizens so we can continue to build weapons of mass destruction. Now that's some big government I'd be happy to gut. They ask America to allow children to starve, the sick and handicapped to fail, the elderly to suffer and the ignorant to remain so. Clearly your grasp on reality is tenuous. I don't hear any drum beating for big government, the pounding in my ears these days is for unbridled corporate profit, and I have no doubt that master is both insatiable and ungrateful.
To a degree you answered your own question. Trying to look for spectrographic data about Venus' atmosphere, while looking through you own would be like trying to listen to a radio station transmitted from Venus while simultaneously listening to a station broadcasting here. The signal you're trying to find would be lost in the noise from the local signal. That said, it should be possible to subtract earth's atmosphere from the signal, but its just a lot easier and cleaner to use Hubble, and the telescopes doing the serious analysis of atmospheres of exoplanets are space telescopes. Because one of the most important things we're looking for is water and we have a hard time seeing that correctly in an atmosphere full of water.
So there are a lot of folks who think that DHS is causing trouble to justify their own budget... could be, a little too obvious and Hollyweird for my taste but not outside the realm of possibility. My only question is that if in fact they're asking to not disturb the black hats so they can zero in on them...
1. Why is this taking so long? Isn't this their specific mandate, aren't they armed to the teeth to detect cyber-terrorism in our nation's infrastructure, I would think that they'd be frog marching bad guys to Gitmo mid-day April 1st?
2. How is this story hitting the air before bad guys are being captured?
3. How critical does an asset have to be, before someone says "Shut those terrorists down right now!!!"? Trains and planes? Nuclear power plant cooling? Air Force One? Trash service in Greenwich, CT?
Here's a bit if information for you... THERE IS NO PUNCH and THERE IS NO JUDY!!!
There are only hands up sock puppets and they move and make noise, For just a moment look a little deeper at the hand moving the puppets. All that drama, and all that buzz, is there to distract you from the folks who make the plans, pay the media, spin the spin doctors and feed you your daily serving of opinions. If you think for a moment there are Democrats and Republicans outside of the greater context of "Wholly Owed Subsidiary of American Corporations", you haven't been watching the play for a while now. Obama does what he's told to do. Just like everyone else in D.C. Obama cuts NASA spending, because there're no taxes to pay for it, because the Republicans refuse to budge on taxes while at the same time push up spending on their own interests (or play at addressing the deficit by suggesting we let 20 million poor people starve to death.) Its all there to get you all het up and pissed at somebody. There's outrage enough for every man, woman and child. Have you not asked the question where is all the money? Who's got the money and what happened to our society? See those kind of questions lead to ugly ideas, and folks with the real wealth, are deeply concerned that you not notice that they have all the wealth. That would be very bad for them. So they've paid for this really exciting soap opera, "Days of our Government". Please enjoy, but really, don't take it too serious, that would be silly.
Hey America! So Sorry!!! Nobody had the heart to say... the money is all gone. We print more, but now it doesn't mean anything any more. The several hundred people at the top of the economic pyramid own everything, have all the money, and are now confronted with how to keep the whole damn thing going without actually putting any real amount of wealth back in the system. So until they all get together this summer in the Hamptons, and figure out what they're willing to fund, new satellites are not on the menu. Come back this fall for an updated budget.
That's because men like Karl Rove (Turdblossom to his friends) engineered huge social wedge issues to get the Religious folk all up and pissy. As soon as someone with a real issue like the destruction of the middle class began to talk, certain conservative candidates could go "Abortion... Boogah, boogah, boogah" or "Homosexuals... Boogah, boogah, boogah" and in a predictably Pavlovian response the forebrains of folks with strong religious views would shut down in the flood of adrenalin that shot out of their enrages adrenal glands.
So we now have about a dozen or so political topics whose only purpose is to end sane debate and distract about 40% of the American people from forming anything resembling a sound or logical opinion. By the way, don't get me wrong, the Dems have their wedge issues too, they just play them a little different. That's because their keepers (the monied interests in Hollywood), have a different agenda. In any case, to paraphrase "Meet the New Boss, same as the Old Boss..." -- The Who "Won't be fooled again".
I'm sorry but Ronny (a sweet guy personally) worked for the large corporate interests. He had been a business spokesman (some say shill, but I suspect he was sincere about his beliefs in Corporate America) since doing commercial for "20 Mule Team Borax Laundry Soap" back in the 50s. He was neither the best actor (see "Bed Time for Bonzo") nor the brightest light that shined (see 'Catsup is a vegetable"), but as politicians go, he was warm, persuasive, and could read his scripts like they were his own words, in short, a great spokesman. Whatever his political persuasions were personally, his handlers were committed to hijacking the American political system and in that sense they were wildly effective. The result was moving America profoundly to the right, ignoring either law or legal precedent to do so (over 300 people in the Reagan Administration were arrested or investigated for stealing, cheating, pilfering, illegal fixing, tampering with and manipulation of government, or just running over the nation rough shod... more that any administration in history) add stuffing the federal courts including the supreme court with ideologues (something that would be finished by the Bush Administration(s)), and the end to functional American government as we know it becomes a fait accompli.
Strangely enough, in today's hyper right political climate, Ronny would be viewed as a social liberal, a tax and spend liberal (forgive me a "Revenue Enhancement" and spend liberal), but as has already been said, his underlying political positions would certainly keep him out of Democratic territory.
Yes, there are actually only three real liberals left in Washington D.C., and they're kept in a glass case at the Smithsonian. Here the liberals are mild Social Conservatives, the middle-of-the-road are Libertarian, and the conservatives are escaped Mental Patients and Religious Fanatics (or both.) Somehow over the last 30 years, corporate interests have found a way to only fund folks who were politically further and further right of center, so that at this point the center is further right than the far right was in 1980. I'm guessing by 2050, if the trend continues, the middle road American politician will publicly be stating that "Hitler was a wuss", human live sacrifices at the reflecting pool near the Washington Monument will commence immediately and that goosestepping in jackboots is an excellent form of aerobic exercise.
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Clearly you haven't looked very far. Windows has crept into all kinds of application that would make you think "WHAT!!!??? Who authorized this!!!???" Just a few off the top of my head include trains, cranes and ships. In any case here's a list of the 10 worst uses for Windows and they range from the silly to the life threatening. Like I'm sure you'd be all warm and fuzzy knowing that the radiation machine measuring your near lethal dose of gamma rays is running vista and hooked up to a network. Good luck with that...
Yeah but imagine having first dibs on the jock itch concession!!! Somebody goin' to da bank tonite!!!
I think the answer is to create communities based on common cause. Social experiments with clear measures and means to communicate with one another. Clearly this mess is failing. Work together to build better, smarter, more sustainable human systems based in honoring the dignity of people and committed to empowering an ethical society where accountability and integrity are inherent aspects of being a citizen.
Provide wide latitude for beliefs and points of view, embrace diversity. Test social theories, discard failures dispassionately. Test, test, test. Design a new kind of society and perhaps it will inspire a new kind of person. One who courageously pursues life for the joy of living. One who knows who they owe and how to pay their debts. A society that honors all, but holds them to account. One that embraces, and empowers, and exhaults being human and drives it citizens to be the best possible expressions of themselves. Where honesty is a given. Where abuse and violence are dealt with justice both swift and compassionate. A society that relates to other societies with brotherhood and generosity, but doesn't give in to aggression or lawlessness.
I've never heard of such a place, but I want to build with all my heart.
The ability to trade mod point in on cool stuff at ThinkGeek somewhere between 11:45 AM and 2:15 PM on Slashdot Day...
In reply to this observation... if you want to destroy Japan... nuke Hawaii!
If the financial loss doesn't kill them, the loss of so many golf courses will.
The problem is that the neocon isn't a true conservative. (S)he is a someone co-opted from a population who's social and religious views trump all other ways of thinking. They've been co-opted by a cynical corporate based political party pandering to their love of "Family Values" and their fear of change and technology. The saddest and most ironic thing is that the worse things get, and the more devastating the changes, the harder they hang onto the ideology and the party responsible. Literally, drowning people hanging onto a boat anchor.
By the way, if by this description you think, I find the party that calls itself Democratic, any more palatable, you would be sadly mistaken. American politics has been an accelerating race to the bottom for so long, what's left is barely fit for human consumption.
There are two responses to this... the first being taking a comment out of context is a no-no, the conversations were fair and founded on the population growing without incredible gains in global support and technology. Ta-da, both things showed up.
Second, we now have 7,000,000,000 people and a third go to bed hungry. Where full on starvation is just a terrible problem in developing nations, severe malnutrition is a full on crisis.
Again, a fair description of the trend, an issue addressed over 40 years, and we are where we are. How does any of that have to do with GW? The men in the 70s were perfectly correct from their position and ultimately were part of a process that saved billions of lives. You know, things like thr "Green Revolution"? Wise people now warn you that you're driving full out towards a cliff, your response is to say "I stopped at that last sign they to me to and nothing happened, I think I'll gun it this time?" Okay, but the people warning aren't the problem... just a hint.
Yeah and Newton was a god in his time but it didn't stop him from trying to create the "Sorcerer's Stone". How does any of this have anything to do with the conversation at hand?
A lot of people have opinions... Einstein said "God doesn't play dice with the universe." People are wrong all the time. That's why we listen to theories after they've proven themselves. Your argument is specious and unless you can come up with a single case where a body of researchers with a widely accepted theory were proven wrong by some new overwhelming discovery, then all your saying is that just because you're a scientist doesn't make your opinions any better than anyone else's and nobody is arguing that.
We are saying science, not scientists, provides compelling explanations regarding the nature of the universe and that GW is accepted by most informed people as fact, verging on irrefutable fact.
Alright, let's try this instead. The body of evidence is now so ridiculously overwhelming, and comes from so many different disciplines and so many different schools of thought and so many different countries and so many different points of view that the big issues are presumed by most researchers as scientific fact. The same way we presume Relativity, Evolution, Newtonian Mechanics, Chemistry, Biology and Genetics. By all means, we make new discoveries by the hour, but these things add wrinkles to and shade nuances of existing frameworks of existing thought. They simply don't overturn large scientific frameworks for which there is such a tremendous body of evidence, and so much success in making predictions.
Holding out belief on the hope that at the last minute some impossible new truth that nobody ever considered is going to overturn millions of person-hours of research and analysis, is at best magical thinking. At worst its devoting yourself to a belief system in the face of physical reality... and that is simple self deception. Not evil, in fact we probably all have areas that we live in hope over. It just doesn't have any rational basis and shouldn't be compared to rational thinking.
I'm sorry but you seem to be the one with a profound lack of information. First there is a tremendous amount of work being done on alternative energy including huge recent breakthroughs in Solar (we are quick approaching the $0.50 per watt area and will surpass oil in unit cost per watt by end of year or early next.) This is critical when you consider the high probability that the $3 gallon of gasoline has gone the way of the dodo, and the $4 gallon is probably close behind it. We are making headway on every front, geothermal, wind, ocean/tidal, bio and synfuels and new advanced nuclear (including micro-reactors, pebble bed, helium fail proof systems and safe fast breeding.) Most important of all, is the incredible reduction in need without ever building a single new reactor by improving global efficiency. The simple fact is that if you take all these things together we are in great shape, can meet or exceed the carbon reductions without so much as an iota of change in the quality of life for anyone save the fossil fuel companies. They sadly would hurt a lot. The rest of us however would be doing remarkably well. More important, we could help the developing world bypass our mistakes and help usher in an era of human satisfaction and abundance never before seen.
As for water rising 10 feet... by when are you talking about? Then what about the next 10, and the 10 after that, and that, and that? Kiss Florida good-bye, highest point is 42 feet. Kiss the entire Mississippi delta (including New Orleans and Baton Rougue) good-bye. Kiss Florence, Italy, London, England, Hong Kong, China and Tokyo, all good-bye. In fact 6 out of 10 critical ports in the world would be inundated or so impacted by rising seas that they would for all intents and purposes be destroyed. Kiss entire nations like Bangladesh good-bye. Where do you suggest they go? I'm certain India would be overjoyed to take in an entire nation of bitterly poor and starving refugees. There are islands all over the world which are threatened, and many that will cease to be habitable. You suggest they move inland, just for grins and giggles what would the logistics of moving a billion people be like? Who's going to absorb these newly homeless people? How do you suggest we pay for this?
Oh, and the conversation about stabilization. That would presume we were sitting on our collective hands watching the world suck and doing absolutely nothing about it. We have plenty of use for carbon. If nothing else it looks like graphene is going to change the world. Just this week, there were half a dozen articles on breakthrough processes to sequester carbon and turn it into fuel, turn it into energy and convert into new and interesting substances with vital economic importance in a technological society. The coolest part is that most of these technologies use bacteria, algae, and other lifeforms to fix carbon.
Before voicing an opinion or regurgitating someone else's, please bother to find out is it holds any water.
Artrage or Corel Painter Essentials are two very reasonable programs that allow you to take photos and convert them into really lovely paintings that look spectacular on canvas. In fact if you want to go a step further, you can print them in any of a number of styles including chalk, pastel, pencil, ink, oil, acrylic or watercolor, and for the paint types you can spray the work with fixative and then apply a layer of transparent gouache which can be painted with a brush leaving real brush strokes and paint texture. Add a few highlights with real acrylic, and the effect is shockingly good.
For a quick thing anybody can do as an inexpensive project, these works are highly prized gifts and touch people surprisingly deep.
To all you young people!!! At the moment of graduation, get about 20 copies of your transcript, Post one on your Social Network page. Send another to a public notary and have the legitimate document publicly recorded. In short, remove the University from the equation. Take back what is yours, and hold it tight. Greedy minds and hearts will rob you at the first opportunity.
The problem is that you are living in a fairy tale of the past. Millions of people have been displaced by cheap labor pouring in on HB-1 visas, and that piece of paper may very soon be the only way to attain a job that isn't flipping burgers for a person of voting age. The world is a darker place than when you were born and the fact that you already have experience not withstanding, trying to make it, let alone get ahead for young people coming out of school is bugger-all hard and get harder by the minute. Show some compassion and sympathy for those who have hurdles to leap that you never had, and won't if you are the least bit lucky.
We are being squeezed by uncaring interests, from all sides, more and more, and its easy to blame others for not being responsible, but it doesn't take much of a hiccup any more to find yourself out in the cold and with a bank account that looks like Mother Hubbards Cupboard. Your personal comfort is not the measure of fairness in a society, and as the wealth continues to fly out of the middle class in this "Trickle !-Down Economy", you should be very careful for whom the bell tolls.
Yes but using your example. Its like that good friend went to the car dealer and said, here's $500 to prevent the transfer of ownership until I get paid back in full, and then bribed a local official to make the whole thing legal. This is nasty, unethical and injurious to the entire system of producing educated young people to staff positions of research, operation and management of our nation's enterprises.
It is also one more link in a growing chain of financial slavery begin forged by our institutions of finance. If we have any hope of taking back our freedom, we best act now while there is some small bit of access left in our government.
The problem isn't that schools are being forced. They may or may not. The problem is that they are being paid to hold you hostage. So now our houses of higher education are just another link, forged into a monolithic financial machine the buys and sells people from the moment they are legal entities until the last of their worldly assets are probated into government hands.
You are absolutely right about the power of government to hold sway over schools, but look who is being served. The banks are the winners here. The students the victims of predatory institutions. Don't go to school, flip burgers and starve. Go to school, get a degree, spend years flipping burgers and maybe get a real job, and spend the next 20 to 30 years paying off a bank, and the interest rates are about to double (and how long before student loans look like credit card debt.) Bought and sold. You are walking, talking bank accounts, and your rights as a human being end with the service contract you sign with the people who own you. This is an inhumane use of human beings and those that profit do so at the expense of humanity and its future development. The time to stop this insanity has long passed. If we are to preserve any semblance of human dignity, its time to end the insanity and take our lives back. Personally I say "To hell with the banks.!"
Wow, Central planners and elite comrades... This is not Soviet Russia. Have you a single wit of proof that anybody in government is getting wealthy on your tax dollars. Don't get me wrong, they're well paid, but the wealthy ones are getting wealthy because they're whores for corporate interests which is where the true wealth lies. As for increasingly draconian crackdowns on civil rights and the accelerating erosion of the Bill of Rights, please look around and see who's being served and who's paying for service.
There are critical social services to a free and functioning society which should be not for profit. Hospitals, Schools, Libraries and a source of Free Information unaffiliated by ownership or political influence. Healthcare shouldn't be the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in a country. Education shouldn't cost a young person their financial future. Libraries are a vital part of providing not just free information, but the education of young people on hungering for knowledge and truth. A public system for providing information which is untainted by political or private interest is the strongest safeguard against the enemies of freedom.
There should be a reliable, social net to keep the poorest and weakest from death and starvation, and help this generation of children to escape poverty. During the 60s, we had the kind of poverty for which a nation as rich as ours should be profoundly ashamed. The Republicans today, are arguing that we need to balance the budget on the heads of our poorest, sickest, eldest citizens so we can continue to build weapons of mass destruction. Now that's some big government I'd be happy to gut. They ask America to allow children to starve, the sick and handicapped to fail, the elderly to suffer and the ignorant to remain so. Clearly your grasp on reality is tenuous. I don't hear any drum beating for big government, the pounding in my ears these days is for unbridled corporate profit, and I have no doubt that master is both insatiable and ungrateful.
To a degree you answered your own question. Trying to look for spectrographic data about Venus' atmosphere, while looking through you own would be like trying to listen to a radio station transmitted from Venus while simultaneously listening to a station broadcasting here. The signal you're trying to find would be lost in the noise from the local signal. That said, it should be possible to subtract earth's atmosphere from the signal, but its just a lot easier and cleaner to use Hubble, and the telescopes doing the serious analysis of atmospheres of exoplanets are space telescopes. Because one of the most important things we're looking for is water and we have a hard time seeing that correctly in an atmosphere full of water.
So there are a lot of folks who think that DHS is causing trouble to justify their own budget... could be, a little too obvious and Hollyweird for my taste but not outside the realm of possibility. My only question is that if in fact they're asking to not disturb the black hats so they can zero in on them...
1. Why is this taking so long? Isn't this their specific mandate, aren't they armed to the teeth to detect cyber-terrorism in our nation's infrastructure, I would think that they'd be frog marching bad guys to Gitmo mid-day April 1st?
2. How is this story hitting the air before bad guys are being captured?
3. How critical does an asset have to be, before someone says "Shut those terrorists down right now!!!"? Trains and planes? Nuclear power plant cooling? Air Force One? Trash service in Greenwich, CT?
Here's a bit if information for you... THERE IS NO PUNCH and THERE IS NO JUDY!!!
There are only hands up sock puppets and they move and make noise, For just a moment look a little deeper at the hand moving the puppets. All that drama, and all that buzz, is there to distract you from the folks who make the plans, pay the media, spin the spin doctors and feed you your daily serving of opinions. If you think for a moment there are Democrats and Republicans outside of the greater context of "Wholly Owed Subsidiary of American Corporations", you haven't been watching the play for a while now. Obama does what he's told to do. Just like everyone else in D.C. Obama cuts NASA spending, because there're no taxes to pay for it, because the Republicans refuse to budge on taxes while at the same time push up spending on their own interests (or play at addressing the deficit by suggesting we let 20 million poor people starve to death.) Its all there to get you all het up and pissed at somebody. There's outrage enough for every man, woman and child. Have you not asked the question where is all the money? Who's got the money and what happened to our society? See those kind of questions lead to ugly ideas, and folks with the real wealth, are deeply concerned that you not notice that they have all the wealth. That would be very bad for them. So they've paid for this really exciting soap opera, "Days of our Government". Please enjoy, but really, don't take it too serious, that would be silly.
Hey America! So Sorry!!! Nobody had the heart to say... the money is all gone. We print more, but now it doesn't mean anything any more. The several hundred people at the top of the economic pyramid own everything, have all the money, and are now confronted with how to keep the whole damn thing going without actually putting any real amount of wealth back in the system. So until they all get together this summer in the Hamptons, and figure out what they're willing to fund, new satellites are not on the menu. Come back this fall for an updated budget.
That's because men like Karl Rove (Turdblossom to his friends) engineered huge social wedge issues to get the Religious folk all up and pissy. As soon as someone with a real issue like the destruction of the middle class began to talk, certain conservative candidates could go "Abortion... Boogah, boogah, boogah" or "Homosexuals... Boogah, boogah, boogah" and in a predictably Pavlovian response the forebrains of folks with strong religious views would shut down in the flood of adrenalin that shot out of their enrages adrenal glands.
So we now have about a dozen or so political topics whose only purpose is to end sane debate and distract about 40% of the American people from forming anything resembling a sound or logical opinion. By the way, don't get me wrong, the Dems have their wedge issues too, they just play them a little different. That's because their keepers (the monied interests in Hollywood), have a different agenda. In any case, to paraphrase "Meet the New Boss, same as the Old Boss..." -- The Who "Won't be fooled again".
I'm sorry but Ronny (a sweet guy personally) worked for the large corporate interests. He had been a business spokesman (some say shill, but I suspect he was sincere about his beliefs in Corporate America) since doing commercial for "20 Mule Team Borax Laundry Soap" back in the 50s. He was neither the best actor (see "Bed Time for Bonzo") nor the brightest light that shined (see 'Catsup is a vegetable"), but as politicians go, he was warm, persuasive, and could read his scripts like they were his own words, in short, a great spokesman. Whatever his political persuasions were personally, his handlers were committed to hijacking the American political system and in that sense they were wildly effective. The result was moving America profoundly to the right, ignoring either law or legal precedent to do so (over 300 people in the Reagan Administration were arrested or investigated for stealing, cheating, pilfering, illegal fixing, tampering with and manipulation of government, or just running over the nation rough shod... more that any administration in history) add stuffing the federal courts including the supreme court with ideologues (something that would be finished by the Bush Administration(s)), and the end to functional American government as we know it becomes a fait accompli.
Strangely enough, in today's hyper right political climate, Ronny would be viewed as a social liberal, a tax and spend liberal (forgive me a "Revenue Enhancement" and spend liberal), but as has already been said, his underlying political positions would certainly keep him out of Democratic territory.
Yes, there are actually only three real liberals left in Washington D.C., and they're kept in a glass case at the Smithsonian. Here the liberals are mild Social Conservatives, the middle-of-the-road are Libertarian, and the conservatives are escaped Mental Patients and Religious Fanatics (or both.) Somehow over the last 30 years, corporate interests have found a way to only fund folks who were politically further and further right of center, so that at this point the center is further right than the far right was in 1980. I'm guessing by 2050, if the trend continues, the middle road American politician will publicly be stating that "Hitler was a wuss", human live sacrifices at the reflecting pool near the Washington Monument will commence immediately and that goosestepping in jackboots is an excellent form of aerobic exercise.