"Your argument is flawed. The US invasion wasn't strictly illegal by international law. Hussein was in material breach of the Gulf War cease-fire, and a number of UN treaties."
Excepting you are doing exactly what I said you were doing. You like the resolutions that sanctioned and condemned Saddam so you are using them as justification, but you when you either didn't get a vote or lost the vote sanctioning the most extreme form of enforcement, an invasion, and all of sudden the UN's will is irrelevant. Since the UN passed all those resolutions it was the UN's call to decide if they had been violated and what the punishment should be, instead the U.S. through a tantrum and decided itself. Like I said the U.S. should either get out of the U.N. or be thrown out instead of using it when its convenient, and then ignoring it when its convenient....quote lengthy rant on Saudi Arabia here...
What does this have to do with anything I said. Saudi Arabia had nothing to do with George H.W. Bush sending signals to the Kurds and Shia at the end of the first gulf war that the U.S. would support them if they revolted against Saddam. They did revolt, and the then first Bush administration looked the other way while Saddam slaughtered them. As a new height in hypocrisy George W. Bush uses some of the mass graves full of those rebels as justification for the second war, though most of those people are dead thanks to the actions of his dad's administration.
"if the House of Saud falls to a fundamentalist regime like the old Taliban or the Iranian government the world as a whole will be in a really nasty spot."
So its OK to topple a despotic regime in Iraq with a high probability it will be replacted with a fundementalist regime like the one in Iran. But somehow its crucial to the entire world that a despotic, already fundementalist regime in Saudi Arabia stay in power. Not sure you were aware but Saudi Arabia already closely resembles Afghanistan under the Taliban, women are deeply oppressed and people are routinely beheaded in public because thats what Islamic law stipulates. The only key difference is Saudi Arabia has lots of oil money, and its royal family is massively corrupted and many of them are decidedly bad Muslims, thanks to the womanizing, gambling, jet setting etc. things that most people do when they are filthy rich.
I'm pretty sure Americans are no judge as to whether the world would be a better or worse place if the House of Saud was deposed. America might be worse off for it because they own like 7% of America which is why we don't complain about all the things we complained about with Saddam and the Taliban. Americans think the House of Saud is sacred because they have massive influence over America's political, economic and media leaders, the kind of influence massive quantities of money can buy. The poor Taliban didn't have that kind of money.
"HW Bush was warned off deposing Hussein the first time because of tensions in moderate nations, specifically Jordan and Saudia Arabia."
So why did that matter then and it was irrelevant the second time around when most of the world condemned the invasion? Was it because the Saudi's secretly gave it the green light the second time and as I said above the Saudi's practically own the Bush administration?
"1.5 trillion of the debt is held by the Social Security Trust Fund."
Social Security has turned in to a regressive tax scheme. Congress has on several occasions dramatically increased the payroll tax rates in order to insure Social Security's "solvency". In fact they generated a huge surplus, workers paying in far more than was being paid out. Did the government invest the money so that it would be there when the system went in red. Well yes but they invested it in themselves, which means they handed themselves this large pile of paper of worthless paper and just spent it.
Especially under the Bush administration with his tax cuts for the wealthy, the Social Security suprplus is for all practical purposes being used to defray the cost of a tax cut for the wealthy. Working people are paying steep and inescapable payroll taxes, often from declining income, while corporations and the wealthy are paying less and less of the tax burden every year.
So one day when Social Security really hits the red what is going to happen:
A. The government will borrow even more money to cover the shortfall B. The government will raise taxes again, and they wont raise income taxes, they will raise payroll taxes on workers in a furtherance of the regressive tax system C. They will raise the retirement age and cut benefits which is another way of screwing working people out of your money.
You want to fix Social Security/Medicare then set the tax rate each year to match the outlay so they are by definition always solvent and never generating a surplus. Generating surpluses and fearmongering over insolvency just prove its a scam by the government to grab more money from working people to throw away.
FDR may have had working people in mind when they started Social Security though back then very few people actually made it to retirement age so it was kind of scam. But thanks to the corruption of our politicians in Washington its actually turned in to a scheme to milk workers of hard earned wages and transfer them in to the pockets of the wealthy.
That is $25 billion over five years. Now you are all the way up to $5 billion a year and then you have to resort to the shady nether regions of "indirect investment estimates". That is like a weeks worth of America's trade deficit.
"Like China wants the UN to start poking its nose into Chinese affairs anymore than they already are."
Here you are showing how clueless you are. If the Chinese starts picking up the U.N.'s tab why would they start poking around more in their internal affairs. Chances are the U.N. would poke less in the affairs of its major benefactor. This statement sounds kind of like it has a undercurrent of desperation because you've started to think about the adverse consequences to the U.S. if it got its wish and was actually thrown out of the U.N. so you are FUD'ing the concept.
The Chinese take the long view. I wager if they saw the chance to gain greater influence over the U.N. and to replace the U.S. as its leading contributor it would pony up $2-5 billion a year in a heart beat. The Chinese would pay it for the same reason the U.S. pays it, control and power.
"Having lived in Canada, you of all people should be aware of what would happen to the Canadian economy if the US was somehow forced to its knees. And if it came down to it, backs against the wall sort of thing..yes, I believe the US would invade Canada for its oil plus use its military to break any world embargo."
Just because I lived in Canada for a while doesn't actually mean I care when arrogant American assholes do what they normally do, and threaten to solve their problems at the end of a gun barrel.
You might not have noticed but your post is a case study in why the world increasingly despise America and Americans who think like you apparently do. Your arrogant and your first approach to solving every problem is waving your dick in the air.
"do you think the oil flow will just keep on a'coming if you kick the US out?"
Uh yea, the U.S. doesn't have any kind of monopoly on oil field technology as much as you would like to think they do. You are just showing your arrogance again, you really think the world can't survive without the U.S. and probably be a better place. Iraq oil production would probably go up if the U.S. got out, because the insurgents would probably stop blowing it up on a daily basis.
"If you kicked all of the US workers in the Saudi Oil fields alone, do you think they could keep up their production levels?"
Who cares if they do, if at the same time you cut off oil to the U.S. it would be a net gain for the world. Americans, who insanely spend 2 and 3 hours a day driving from the suburbs, usually solo, to their jobs are single handedly squandering a disproportionate share of a precious resource.
The facts in front of you are the Bush administration sold this war to the world based on Iraq possessing WMD's, and having ties to 9/11 and Al Qaeda. Neither of these were true. its revisionism to make out like it was really about "Freedom and Democracy" and because Saddam liked to build palaces.
You are missing two critical fact about Saddam's obstruction of the WMD inspection regime.
A) When the war was actually launched he was cooperating with U.N. inspectors, the inspectors had to flee the country ahead of the invasion.
B) The CIA has after billions of dollars spent and a year and a half of unfettered searching found no WMD's so apparently as troubled as it was, the sanctions worked.
The bottomline is when the time came for the U.N to authorize the invasion of Iraq it didn't, so as a result, the U.S. invasion was illegal under current international law. Either you abide by UN votes or you don't in which case you should get out, instead of adhering to the decisions you like and ignoring the ones you don't. Building consensus is hard, it usually ends in everyone being unhappy but its usually better than unilateralism.
It appears the U.N.'s judgement was in fact right because they didn't buy the U.S. propaganda that Saddam was on the verge of giving a nuclear bomb to Al Qaeda.
The fact that Saddam was a prick and built palaces is no justification for preemptive warfare. Before the first Gulf War and sanctions Iraq was in fact a pretty prosperous place. It was a secular state versus an extremist Islamic state like Saudi Arabia or Iran. Yes Saddam was a two bit dictator but the world is full of those. If the U.S. wanted to take him down they should have done it in the first gulf war when they had a fresh justification. If they would done it then it would have saved the lives of millions, for example the lives of the Kurds and Shia's George H.W. Bush encouraged to revolt and then turned his back on.
"I'm wondering how much aid the U.S. has given your country through the years."
I'm American, though I'm increasingly embarrassed to admit it. The chump change the U.S. hands out in foreign aid doesn't even register against what its sucked out of the world over the years. The World Bank and IMF in particular hand out billions of dollars most of which disappears into the pockets of corrupt dictators, and leave the country and its people deeply in debt, worse off, and at the mercy of the tyranny of the IMF's economic dictates. I'm willing to bet you the third world would be a better place if the IMF never existed. It is just another tool by the U.S. to acquire control over poor nations.
Yea why should it care, why doesn't it just get out. Because the U.S. actually cares in a massive way about the U.N. as a forum for the U.S. to arm twist the rest of the world in to doing its bidding. Its not real successful at it, and less so each year under the Bush administration, but I assure you if the U.S. were actually faced with be cutting off from throwing its weight around in the U.N., and were, in particular, denied its security council veto the U.S. would freak.
All you U.N. haters in the U.S. are blowing smoke, nothing more. You deserve to get your wish.
"You forgot D. Figure out how to make up for ~25% of the UN's budget."
The UN spends according to one source $10 billion a year. What is the United States' cut when it bothers to pay, a couple billion dollars a year. Its chump change. The U.S. is the one that makes a lot more out of it than reality justifies. China, with its new found prosperity could pick up the difference in a heart beat.
Your ecomonic threats are hot air. Throwing the U.S. out of the U.N. would have nothing to do with economics and markets until and unless it escalated to full scale military or economic conflict. The U.S. is in fact more dependent on the rest of the world than the other way around. The U.S. despite its wealth is the world's biggest debtor nation, not just consumer but, in trade, production and government deficits. If places like China and Japan stopped buying treasuries and dollars the U.S. would be in an instant fiscal crisis. If China decided to shut off the container ship traffic to the U.S. the U.S. economy would crater. Its lost on the Bush administration but budget and trade deficits make your country very vulnerable to the whims of other nations.
"but the consequences of being right hurt you just as much as it hurts the US."
I'm American not European though I lived in Canada for years and am aiming to get out of America next year if it stays its current course.
It would be a trauma if the U.S. economy were sliced out of the world, but the U.S. would suffer far more than the rest of the world. America doesn't actually produce anything any more. Its wealth is predicated on past glory, service industries and controlling wealth and shuffling it from one pile to another. The nations that produce things like manufactured goods, electornics, steel and oil are where the real productivity and new wealth lies. If the world switched to the Euro as the dominant currency, especially for oil that would deal a mighty blow to American arrogance. If oil producers embargo the U.S. again the U.S. would be devastated far worse than it was in the 70's. The producers wouldn't really even miss the U.S. oil market because China is clamouring for more oil every day and there is a global shortage. That would be one way to bring down global oil prices, just shut off the supply to the U.S.
The only real leverage the U.S. has in the world is its military.
In recent years, especially since 9/11, the FBI has expanded itself in to a global police force. They are quite proud of it, here is their web page where they brag about it.
"Office of International Operations (OIO). OIO now supports some 200 FBI employees in 45 Legats worldwide and hundreds of Agents rotating in and out of temporary assignments overseas."
"Thanks to the foundations laid by the Liaison Section beginning six decades ago, we now have solid working relationships with a range of colleagues in every part of the world, pursuing terrorist, intelligence, and criminal threats with international dimensions. It's no exaggeration to say that the FBI is a global organization for a global age."
Next time you hear Republican's/Conservatives rail about the UN and world government stop and think a minute. They aren't really complaining about the idea of a world government, they are only complaining about who runs it. They want to run it, out of Washington, out of the oval office and at the moment that means they want George W. Bush to run the world.
The bureaucracy at the U.N. is deeply flawed and a good case can be made against it running the world. But instead should the world be run by a religious extremist elected by a tiny percentage of the world's population and whose main goal in life is to enrich and empower that tiny minority at the expense of the rest of the world.
If you don't think the U.S. is angling for a global empire just read the above description of the FBI. Consider the U.S. now has troops in more than a hundred nations, along with big and growing DEA and CIA contigents, and of course the NSA is spying on all communications on the planet. The U.S. also spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined and that spending is accelerating, not slowing, though most of those conventional military forces are of little value against the Al Qaeda threat. The Bush administration is also actively developing new tactical nukes with the expressed intent of bestowing upon itself the privilege of being the only nation on the planet with the license to use nuclear weapons in otherwise conventional wars.
And of course add in the U.S. has bestowed upon itself the right to use preemptive aggressive warfare to take down any sovereign government it so chooses, with or without any valid justification for the action. All they need is to lay an accusation the nation might someday be a threat to the U.S. which is a charge that can be laid against any nation.
One can only hope that Bush and company are thrown out and Kerry doesn't pursue the same path, which is certainly in doubt on both scores.
If bush stays in power, or any U.S. government continues down the current course, the rest of the world really needs to consider forming a global alliance to counter the United State's imperial ambitions, unless you want extremist Christians running the entire planet, and forcing their "unique" idealogy on you.
Probably one of the best things the UN, and its members nations, could do at this point to give the U.S. reciprocal treatment in a three phase plane:
A. Move the UN headquarters out of New York and to Europe without giving the U.S. the option to veto in the security council
B. Place the U.S. on probation to end its imperial ambitions or be removed from the security council
C. If U.S. behavior continuesand eject the U.S.from the U.N. all together.
Maybe the Republicans will dance with joy at getting out of the U.N but I wager when they see their power and influence in the U.N. being eliminated they will freak and suddenly develop a passion for it.
I'd really like to see how much the U.S. likes being totally isolated and being the global pariah its current policies have called for. Their are obvious feasibility problems with this, since Britain, Italy and Australia would oppose it but I'm not sure how many other nations actually would.
"But the tax code encourages chicanery so that companies can avoid paying taxes."
I'd have to refresh my memory but I should add I'm pretty sure the vehicles Enron was using may have been, on the surface, tax shelters but they quickly turned in to tools for concealing debt, creating imaginary profits, and tools for the Fastow's, and their friends, to transfer money from Enron in to their pockets. It was classic corruption and not really just tax sheltering run amuck.
You seem to be arguing that we erase all the tax codes and accounting regulations and corruption would disappear. The key question is how do you have accounting in a completely deregulated world. Accounting requires a set of rules, regulations or accepted practices. Unless you compel everyone to play by the same accounting rules you wont be able to really assess the health of any company or establish its worth. Accounting is, to my thinking, by definition a form of regulation.
"Energy and defense are probably the most regulated businesses there are after banking, so these don't serve as examples of problems with the free market."
In the case of Energy and Enron, many problems sprang out of the fact they capitalized on an environment which had been heavily regulated, and was transitioning to deregulated, especially since the regulating agency FERC was frequently looking the other way thanks to the Bush administrations and their closeness to executives at Enron. You might argue if it had been a truly free market the extortion that took place in California wouldn't have happened. I would argue it was precisely because the markets had been freed, and regulators were missing in action, and corrupt traders decided to exploit it.
Enron, Dynegy and others colluded to create artificial shortages and extreme high prices. The only way a truly free market would have solved the problem would have been for an "honest" company to come on scene and sell California electricity at fair prices. As long as all the available suppliers colluded to create an artificial shortage for an essential commodity they could charge exorbinant prices and the consumer was screwed.
This is the most common tactic of unregulated monopolists, oil companies being a sterling example. Through merger and acquisition, or collusion, you reduce the number of suppliers, and the suppliers that remain make secret pacts to divide the market and charge artificially inflated prices, they all make more money than if they were engaging in free market competition. As long as the barrier to entry is high and they keep any new competitors that aren't part of the pact from entering the market consumers are powerless unless a regulator intervenes.
As far as the defense sector is concerned it is heavily regulated but it is supposed to be heavily regulated to insure fair competition for government contracts. In practice corruption is eliminating the competition as is a steady string of mergers which has dramatically reduced the number of defense contractors. It is again a sector approaching monopoly. Most sectors of the American economy are. There are now a very few contractors left. The government is to the point it has to award one contract to Boeing and the next to Lockheed to maintain the pretense there is competition. In fact they is very little left and the end result is the consumer, the U.S. tax payer in this case is being screwed.
""Predatory pricing" isn't sustainable in the long run, and while it lasts the consumer reaps the benefit of cheaper goods and services."
It doesn't have to be sustainable in the long run. It just has to be sustained long enough to bankrupt a smaller competitor, or so weaken them that they acquiesce to a merger. I'm thinking we should dig up some references on Standard Oil and Rockefeller. You'll see a case study in what is likely to happen in a "free" market. Standard Oil either bought or destroyed every competitor until it acheived a monopoly.
One problem with people who argue for these theoretical totally free markets is they aren't possible. There is always going to be regulation its just a question of how much. When J.D. Rockefeller was dynamiting his competitors wells was that something that shouldn't be regulated? Was it the duty of the owner of the dynamited well to defend it from his competitors?
"Do you really think that regulations are made with your benefit in mind?"
In the case of antitrust regulation they are most definitely designed with the consumer in mind. They sprung out of the progressive movement at the turn of the last century which was a peoples movement the likes of which we are unlikely to see again. The only reason you may doubt they are for our benefit is unfortunately the politicians and lawyers tasked to enforce them are frequently corrupted or ineffective so they aren't enforcing them.
The regulations FERC was tasked to enforce in the energy market would have prevented the California energy crisis but for the fact that the Bush administration, no doubt at the request of Ken Lay, sat on their hands while Enron was screwing California in an attempt to make enough money to bail them out of the hole they were in.
Good for you if its not that way where you work. You're lucky. What do you mean by "surrounded by successful people well past 30". Any of them over 40 and not on a management track? How old are you? I wage you are young. When I was young I didn't perceive the Logan's Run nature of the tech industry. Your best strategy is to score big, early, and get out. What kind of company do you work for? I'm doubting its a startup.
"When will people get over the illusion that because the current younger generation has greater access to technology, that automatically makes them brainiacs."
Age discrimination has little to do with this. A university isn't the one and only place you learn the skills you need to do your job. Chances are you will be forced to learn new skills on the job year in year out anyway, or at least you will if you are any good.
The real dynamics of age discrimination is very similar to outsourcing. The older you are the higher your salary, so you have to have much higher productivity to justify your salary. You also hit a glass ceiling in the company job descriptions if you stay on a technical track, some companies are good at continuing to incentivize you when this happens, others let you hit it and your career stalls unless you are "smart" and jump to a management track.
The older you are the less likely you are to be suckered in to working 80 hour weeks for 40 hours pay, especially to compensate for the mistakes of incompetent management. You are also less likely to be tolerant for incompetent management because you've seen it before and you know how and why its bad and how the staff pays for it, and the incompetent manager usually doesn't.
You also become less tolerant over time of senior executive who don't work very hard but loot all the options and bonuses and screw their staff. The discrepancy between executive compensation and worker compensation has reached a truly disturbing and historical multiple.
As you age there is also a fair chance you've been through one or more projects that have severely burned you out and until you've been there you don't appreciate the permanent damage it does to you, most managers do though.
To put it another way younger works tend to be more gullible. Most employers like gullible workers.
If you read the link on Google it says, for example:
"The strategy has led to a work force with an average age under 30 and with less than 2 percent of employees over 40, according to the claim. Google employed slightly over 1,600 people in 2003."
I'm pretty sure the employees over 40 are the senior executives and financial people.
When you hit 40 and if you are still a programmer or sysadmin you may be singing a different tune unless you are very good or lucky. If you are just hacking code there a plenty of young people that can do it just as well, are willing to work longer hours, for less pay and benefits, and their insurance is cheaper.
Maybe because its a private corporation created by the Democratic and Republican parties with the explicit goal of shutting third party candidates out of the political process, as they are doing in so many ways now.
The two parties joined together to sieze control of the debates from the League of Women Voters using this private corporation. The League wasn't always the greatest defender of democracy but they were better than the current two party corporate monopoly on public debate.
I think it would be OK for a private corporation to run debates as long as they buy the airtime for them from the networks as they do for campaign commercials and as Ross Perot did for his infomercials. If the networks are giving them 4 1/2 hours of free air time, especially networks broadcasting on publicly controlled airwaves, I'm pretty sure they should be required to allow any viable candidate access to the debates or give them equal time. Viability is easy to determine, is the candidate on the ballot in enough states to theoretically win the election.
Of course the two party monopoly has a solution there too. They send out a small army of lawyers, state by state, as they are doing against Nader, in an effort to keep third party candidates from getting on the ballot at all. The Dem's lawyer are apparently contacting people gathering signatures to get Nader on the ballot and briefing them on the legal consequences should any of the signatures they collect prove to be fraudulent, to put it another way they are threatening people with jail time for trying to exercise their supposed right to "Freedom and Democracy", to have a choice, or to run for office. Our constitution doesn't specify a two party system and I'm pretty sure anyone who meets the basic criteria to be President outlined in the constituion, has the right to run for office and it should be extremely illegal for the two party monopoly to block it. To put it another way the DNC and RNC have no right to decide who can and can't run for office.
The two party monopoly us using their control of state legislators to create unreasonably high barriers to gain access to the ballot. For example the Greens were disbanded as a party in Indiana because they didn't garner 3% of the vote in an off year election, and are forced in to the difficult process of gathering valid signatures to get on the ballot until they garner 3% again.
The U.S. has turned in to an embarrassment to democratic principles. Any of you in other Democratic countries look to America to see how not to do it, and to what happens when you get complacent and let two corrupt, morally bankrupt parties monopolize the system. If there were an honest and viable third party, with an intelligent, charismatic candidate on the ballot, with funding and access to the media, there is a real danger people would turn to it in droves. The two major parties know that so they snuff out every viable alternative at every turn.
So voters in America have no option, they have to choose between one bankrupt party or the other, choos between the lesser of two evils...voters in America are screwed. You know your screwed when both of your Presidential candidates are wealthy, privileged, spoiled prepsters, both born with a silver spoon in their mouths, both Yale graduates, both members of Skull and Bones, the secret society of the elite of the elite. In a country with 300 million people what are the odds both of your presidential candidates would be so nearly identical, both drawn from the same secret society, of the elite, with 800 living members.
The U.S. desperately needs a new Progressive movement. It sprung out of an era in the late 1800's and early 1900's when robber barons and corporations were destroying the lives of most Americans just as they are today. Political corruption was rampant as it is today. Corporations were rapidly merging in to monpolies to the detriment of everyone but th
"Corruption is almost by definition inefficient, so corruption tends to get weeded out."
I'm inclined to say you are pretty naive. Could you provide some evidence to support your assertion. Corruption is almost always very profitable until and unless you get caught at it. You need look no further than Enron, Worldcom and Halliburton. Until they got caught Enron and Worldcom were wildly successful. Halliburton continues to enjoy success though their corruption has been exposed numerous times. Its hard for them to fail when their political connections and use of crony capitalism(a.k.a. corruption) insures a steady stream of very lucrative no bid contracts from the U.S. Government, which happens to be run by one of their own, which is a form of corruption too, since it translates directly in to favoritism.
Corruption translates in to using influence and bribes to obtain lucrative contracts at the expense of your competitors.
Corruption translates in to manipulated financial reports that make your company look like a superstar in the equity markets, it shoots to the moon and all the shareholders make a killing as long as they cash out at the right time, and move the proceeds out of range of law enforcement.
The only risk in corruption is in getting caught. When that happens then you may loose everything depending on your ability to ride it out.
If corruption were the losing proposition you say it is, it wouldn't be so prevalent. I'm willing to conjecture that on both small and large scale corruption is probably a dominate, if not the dominant, force in most markets.
"Under a free market, the inefficient tend to get eliminated, replaced, by the efficeient."
Unfortunately under truly free markets the highest efficiency is almost always attained by the largest corporation thanks to the economy of scale. They in turn quickly dispose of competitors either by merging with them, or destroying them with predatory pricing and tactics which a large company with deep pockets, think Microsoft, can usually sustain better than a small company. Left on its own its a near certainty capitalism will lead to one large monopoly dominating each market and then one monopoly will ultimately dominate the whole economy. Globalization is making this outcome ever more likely, regulation is the only thing likely to stop it.
Wouldn't be surprised if he can add an age discrimination suit in to boot. 63 is pretty old for a programmer and he was 2 years from retirement and getting on Medicare. I wonder if he was screwed out of retirement benefits too.
Not sure if the propensity for age discrimination is as high in civil service as the private sector. In the private sector it would be a near certainty that his age played in to the decision. With the sky rocketing cost of health insurance alone private employers have developed a strong incentive to get rid of older employees, especially those with health problems, and they will use the first convenient excuse available to do it.
It reminds me of the case of Brian Reid, the 54 year old exec at Google who was fired right before the IPO was announced, and was screwed out of millions in stock options, because he didn't fit in Google's "youthful culture". The person firing him was stupid enough to say that.
It kind of sad trend especially in high tech, that you are pretty much used up and expendable when you hit 30, and are certainly done for by 40, unless you've brown nosed your way in to a VP position or start your own company. When you hit 50 or 60, people like this asshat boss are looking for any excuse they can you to ax you and hire someone young and pretty, who is less likely to complain, has no seniority and will work for peanuts.
No it doesn't, "Not bad" means "good", you insert "that" in it and you are saying it wasn't "good" but it wasn't "bad" either.
You are the one that is completely missing something here, as the other two replies to your post point out. Unless you have an "agenda", give it up.
If you want an example of "contradiction" so you understand the concept in the future:
Cheney on Meet the Press: "It's been pretty well confirmed, that he(Atta) did go to Prague and he did meet with a Senior Official of the Iraqi Intelligence service.""
Sometime later in a CNBC interview after it had been thouroughly established Atta, the leader of the 9/11 plot, never met Iraqi Secret Service in Prague:
CNBC: "You have said in the past that it was quote "pretty well confirmed."
Cheney: "No, I never said that. Never said that. Absolutely not."
Well you guessed wrong. Gotta love America, you are either Repubulican or Democrat and there is no third option. The only thing I'll say in Kerry's favor is he is the lesser of two evils compared to the crony capitalists and liars currently occupying the White House, though just barely. Kerry is a prep school elitist, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Yale Grad, Skull and Bones exactly like little George, sure to serve the elite first and the people second if at all. There isn't really a dimes worth of difference between them deep down. The American people were denied much choice in this election when Kerry locked up the nomination.
All I can say about the rest of your post is its straight out of the Bush propaganda book, which is little more than trying to explain away why invading Iraq wasn't a war based on lies when it clearly was. "Oh sure we lied about all the original reasons for it but we are bringing "Freedom and Democracy" to the world, and thats what God put me on Earth to do, he told me himself, so its OK, trust me, lock and load".
If you were to really apply this strategy here is what you need to do. You need to take out the governments of:
- Saudi Arabia - Pakistan - Egypt - United States
The first two, in particular, have for years worked with, funded and harbored muslim extremists. When the Taliban fell the U.S. had to let Pakistan evacuate hundreds of its secret service and military people from Afghanistan that were working with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The tribal area of Pakistan is still Al Qaeda's home base and they are largely unhindered by the Pakistan government there. Pakistan's military seldom goes in there except to put on a show to keep the American's happy. Pakistan is harboring Al Qaeda far more than Saddam ever did.
The first three on my list are dictatorships, and the forth is heading that way. Why don't we take them down because, I'll tell you because those dictators are our friends, and the Saudi's own a big piece of the American economy. While your at it our biggest trading partner China is a dictatorship and Russia is pretty much back to one. Why don't we take them out if "Freedom and Democracy", at the point of a gun, is the solution to the worlds problems.
Pakistan has the single biggest proliferater of nuclear weapons on the planet. It appears they single handedly jump started the nuclear weapons programs in North Korea and Iran. The Bush administration likes to brag about the great work they did busting up the A.Q. Khan. They forget to mention the let the ring run for years, Pakistan's current government was thouroughly aware of it too, and its done grievous damage on the nuclear proliferation front. The forget to mention A. Q. Khan received a full pardon in Pakistan, is free as a bird, wealthy, and a revered hero in the Muslim world for giving the Muslim world the bomb. By contrast we leveled Iraq and jailed Saddam over a vague supsicion of nuclear proliferation, though Iraq didn't have any nuclear program, let alone actually proliferate nuclear technology to rogue states or terrorists.
Saddam was a secular dictator, Iraq was unique in the Arab world in that its men didn't have beards. Why, because Saddam outlawed them as a way to obstruct fundementalist Islam. He in fact aggressively suppressed fundementalist Islam, he gave women more equality than they got in the rest of the Arab world, and their rights are rapidly eroding in the new Iraq which is rushing towards an Islamic government. It defies logic for Al Qaeda and Saddam to have worked together, Saddam was an infidel in the eyes of Al Qaeda, and Saddam hated fundamentalists.
Despite all of your rambling about "Freedom and Democracy" its going to take a miracle for Iraq to not end up with:
- An islamic government, potentially a harsh one modelled after Iran - A puppet government like Allawi's installed by the U.S. through rigged elections. You wer
Christ there is no contradiction there. "Well attendance was not that bad." is an extremely relative term and its depends on your idea of what "bad" is. It in no way, shape or form suggests he had a stellar/perfect attendance record in fact is suggests his attendance was not great, it just wasn't THAT BAD. "He missed quite a few" says exactly the same thing. He did miss some classes but he did show up most of the time, if his attendance was bad he would have said "he missed a lot of classes" and "his attendance was bad".
I'm dumbfounded you all are willing to hang this guy's credibility out to dry over this zealous parsing of two very vague phrases. I sure wish you could be so zealous about Bush administration statements about Saddam's ties to 9/11 and his WMD's all of which have proven to be outright lies, lies that have gotten a lot of people killed. Even worse they are at various times denying they said them or are still making the same assertions in the face of overwhelming reality. If you want to parse some statements and paint some people as liars why don't you work those over because they weren't even remotely vague and are increasingly, provably false.
OK I'll say it again, there isn't any real contradiction between those two statements, I'm baffled why you think there is unless you are REALLY reaching for something that isn't there. It sure as hell isn't "obvious".
The original poster was clearly out to trash a Harvard Professor for having an "agenda" and all his fellow professor though a guilt by association and his case simply isn't there. He's pretty obviously out to defend his man Bush. You come along and support him, and again your arguement just isn't there, and I'm baffled why your trying to make it.
Those two statements aren't contradictory, "not that bad" is a polite way to say his attendance wasn't the greatest, so is "he missed quite a few".
You are reading a lot more in to those two lines than I think most reasonable people would. To put it another way I think you may be the one with the agenda here. Apparently its to try and discredit Harvard Business School profs, by making one of them, Tsurumi out to be a liar. Unfortunately nothing you've shown so far makes your case.
Are you upset a bunch of smart people banded together to criticize your president? Is the cognitive dissonance thing kicking in, as its want to do with Bush fanatics.
I'm pretty sure Bush's head is his least vulnerable and least used part of his anatomy. I wager Bush uses his balls in place of his brain so I'm guessing he must wear a bullet proof jock strap. Anyone have photos with bulges down that way?
Uh, where in this did you prove anything Tsurumi said was untrue?
"My daddy got me into the guard despite the waiting list"
George's dad did get him in the guard ahead of a waiting list with 500 or so candidates, there was only a handful of openings. Even worse George outright flunked the aptitude test, and should have been disqualified immediately. Instead he was pushed to the head of the list over people who actually passed the aptitude test.
The only question here is if George had the bad judgement to brag about it. Privileged kids, and I went to college with a bunch of them, often do brag about their privilege.
"Tsurumi: Well attendance was not that bad. But his attention span was very short."
Uh, I imagine most professor can assess the attention span of their students. This doesn't qualify as a smear campaign/agenda.
"How many times did George Bush come drunk to your class, as a student?"
Its no secret George was a massive partier during this period to put it politely. To be impolite about it he was probably an alcoholic, cocaine abuser and a skirt chaser. Its a near certainty he did go to class hungover, most college students do, and its certainly plausible he may have gone to class under the influence. Again you haven't got made a case that Tsurumi was being untruthful. What he is saying is plausible and you can't prove its not, unless maybe you can find someone with sterling credentials in all the same classes who disputes him.
Either Tsurumi doesn't like Bush and has an agenda or Bush had deep character flaws especially around this time. He and his whole family admit he was a very troubled young man, at least until he quit being a drunk, quit doing Cocaine, found Jesus and decided he was going to be President though he clearly isn't qualified for the job.
My favorite Bush quote of the week, when is in White tie and tux giving a speech to the "the haves and the have-mores." Bush smirks: "Some people call you the elite. I call you my base."
Its bad enough that most politicians serve the elite and not the people, but George had the poor judgement to admit it in front of a camera, smirk and make a joke out of it. This is not a person who should be President of the United States.
I'd have to agree its unlikely it was a wire, or if it was the person that was coaching him over it was as brain damaged as Bush.
If its a bullet proof vest then it tends to suggest Bush and his Secret Service are paranoid chicken shits. He was inside a tightly controlled auditorium, and I imagine its a given everyone was screened on the way in. I doubt you could find a much safer venue.
He is routinely in campaign appearances in shirt sleeves where I doubt he's wearing a vest and he has people 360 around him.
If it is a bullet proof vest I guess its indicative of how afraid of Democrats he is. In his campaign appearances only loyal Republican's are allowed. Here half the people in the hall were Democrats so apparently George is deathly afraid for his life in the presence of Democrats.
I'm compelled to think this may be further proof that Bush is a paranoid sociopath after having lived the life of a bubble boy for the last 4 years.
You may recall Bush/Cheney claim the terrorists hate us for our "Freedom and Democracy". They have also, at various times, said we can't beat the terrorists and this war may never end. This was not an acceptable state of affairs, so they've been compelled to find a solution and it is amazing in its elegance and simplicity.
If they get rid of all the "Freedom and Democracy" the terrorists will no longer have a reason to hate us. Peace and victory will ensue.
Don't you love the news today, the Bush administration is apparently claiming some guy in Iraq surfed the internet in July and got floor plans to some obscure small town schools in America. Three months later they are putting out all points bulletins that America's schools are in grave danger, they are advised to place locks on every window and door, immediately, and they are strongly advised to allow only one point of entry to every campus in the nation, presumably using liberal amounts of razor wire as necessary to achieve this end. As Jeff Foxworthy would put it, "You know you are in police state"...
Its a month before an election and and the campaign strategy of the incumbents is amazing in its simplicity, stoke as much fear as humanly possible in the heart of every American. Does this qualify as one of probably many October Surprises we'll see from the Bush administration in order to insure reelection.
"It is unclear to Indymedia how and why a server that is outside the US jurisdiction can be seized by US authorities."
This is simply explained. It is thanks to the fact that, especially since 9/11, the FBI has expanded itself in to a global police force. They are quite proud of it, here is their web page where they brag about it.
"Office of International Operations (OIO). OIO now supports some 200 FBI employees in 45 Legats worldwide and hundreds of Agents rotating in and out of temporary assignments overseas."
"Thanks to the foundations laid by the Liaison Section beginning six decades ago, we now have solid working relationships with a range of colleagues in every part of the world, pursuing terrorist, intelligence, and criminal threats with international dimensions. It's no exaggeration to say that the FBI is a global organization for a global age."
You see the disturbing thing about it is:
A) Say you are fed up with the fact the U.S. is turning in to a police state. In the old days you would become an ex pat and find some place better to live. Well its becoming increasingly hard to find places in the world where the American police state doesn't have a DOD, CIA, NSA and FBI presence.
B) They are trampling most international law on jurisdiction and extradition. Really the only thing stopping it is if each nation tells them to go to hell and defends their sovereignty. Unfortunately a host of nations are either:
- partners in the war on terror and giving each other a blank check to run amuck on the law enforcement front - bribed/blackmailed by the U.S. especially through the IMF and World Bank - easily coerced by an unmatched U.S. military which has declared its fondness for preemptive invasion (Iraq) and government topplings(Haiti).
It is, for example, a major new initiative on the part of Ashcroft to hunt down American sex tourists in places like Central America. It is a noble goal on the face of it to hunt down pedophiles, the problem is when you are in a foreign country you are supposed to answer to their laws and law enforcement agencies first, and the FBI should in fact have absolutely no jurisdiction with extradition being the only avenue, and that is normally only if you are wanted for something you did in the U.S. The FBI has increasingly decided you can be made to answer to American law no matter where you are on the planet. It is quite chilling when you think about it because it increasingly means no one can escape America if it continues down its current path to nutcase-dom and dictatorship.
I wouldn't count on it depending on the country. If someone starts launching what are in effect ballistic missiles from some random country, against the wishes of the U.S., I assure you the U.S. will interfere in a hearbeat. The U.S. is routinely going into orbit over North Korea's missile launches and their trajectory isn't much different from these, and this vehicle is way more maneuverable. I wonder how it would fare against Little George's missile defense system.
Though, I wager if the U.S. tries to kill this off, which I thouroughly expect them to since this program is making NASA and the U.S. government look like chumps, I imagine Russia or China would pick it up in a heartbeat and just tell the U.S. to piss off.
"On the other hand, you have to acknowledge that the private approach is typically to put profits first, last, and mostly in-between, and if that means cutting corners, well what's a few accidents?"
As opposed to NASA, who would NEVER cut corners and have accidents. Where were these agencies for the two shuttle disasters.
NASA ignored the fact that the O rings were failing in the SRB's. They were under political pressure from the Reagan administration to launch the teacher in to space so the President could score some political points, so they ignored the fact that it was one of the coldest days ever in that part of Florida, the launch pad was covered in ice, and the O ring problem would get get worse in cold weather.
Fast forward, they knew the shuttle was struck by big chunks of debris on launch, they knew there was a radar track of something big drifting away from the shuttle on orbit. They didn't follow up as they should have because they were under political pressure to stay on an arbitrary space station launch schedule set by the Bush administration, so they put schedule ahead of safety.
All in all it rings pretty hollow to act like the gubmint is some kind of pillar of safety.
I'd take Rutan's judgement over a bunch of bureaucrats any day. I'm pretty sure they aren't launching over major population centers. I've reached the point I's rather see some brave adventurers taking some chances and doing something instead of NASA which is paralyzed by "safety" and has reached the point that A) it still isn't safe and B) its spending huge sums of moneys and not doing ANYTHING in the manned space program.
So bottomline make sure they are flying trajectories that dont take them over populations centers, I'd think the FAA was already doing that, let the passengers sign waivers and otherwise get the hell out of the way so we can have a space program for a change.
To be honest I'm amazed Rutan isn't being shutdown on WMD and homeland security grounds. As crazy as the current governments is over weapons I'd think a powerful rocket like this, not under the control of the gubmint, would be a major national security threat.
Slashdot Mirror
"Your argument is flawed. The US invasion wasn't strictly illegal by international law. Hussein was in material breach of the Gulf War cease-fire, and a number of UN treaties."
...quote lengthy rant on Saudi Arabia here...
Excepting you are doing exactly what I said you were doing. You like the resolutions that sanctioned and condemned Saddam so you are using them as justification, but you when you either didn't get a vote or lost the vote sanctioning the most extreme form of enforcement, an invasion, and all of sudden the UN's will is irrelevant. Since the UN passed all those resolutions it was the UN's call to decide if they had been violated and what the punishment should be, instead the U.S. through a tantrum and decided itself. Like I said the U.S. should either get out of the U.N. or be thrown out instead of using it when its convenient, and then ignoring it when its convenient.
What does this have to do with anything I said. Saudi Arabia had nothing to do with George H.W. Bush sending signals to the Kurds and Shia at the end of the first gulf war that the U.S. would support them if they revolted against Saddam. They did revolt, and the then first Bush administration looked the other way while Saddam slaughtered them. As a new height in hypocrisy George W. Bush uses some of the mass graves full of those rebels as justification for the second war, though most of those people are dead thanks to the actions of his dad's administration.
"if the House of Saud falls to a fundamentalist regime like the old Taliban or the Iranian government the world as a whole will be in a really nasty spot."
So its OK to topple a despotic regime in Iraq with a high probability it will be replacted with a fundementalist regime like the one in Iran. But somehow its crucial to the entire world that a despotic, already fundementalist regime in Saudi Arabia stay in power. Not sure you were aware but Saudi Arabia already closely resembles Afghanistan under the Taliban, women are deeply oppressed and people are routinely beheaded in public because thats what Islamic law stipulates. The only key difference is Saudi Arabia has lots of oil money, and its royal family is massively corrupted and many of them are decidedly bad Muslims, thanks to the womanizing, gambling, jet setting etc. things that most people do when they are filthy rich.
I'm pretty sure Americans are no judge as to whether the world would be a better or worse place if the House of Saud was deposed. America might be worse off for it because they own like 7% of America which is why we don't complain about all the things we complained about with Saddam and the Taliban. Americans think the House of Saud is sacred because they have massive influence over America's political, economic and media leaders, the kind of influence massive quantities of money can buy. The poor Taliban didn't have that kind of money.
"HW Bush was warned off deposing Hussein the first time because of tensions in moderate nations, specifically Jordan and Saudia Arabia."
So why did that matter then and it was irrelevant the second time around when most of the world condemned the invasion? Was it because the Saudi's secretly gave it the green light the second time and as I said above the Saudi's practically own the Bush administration?
"1.5 trillion of the debt is held by the Social Security Trust Fund."
Social Security has turned in to a regressive tax scheme. Congress has on several occasions dramatically increased the payroll tax rates in order to insure Social Security's "solvency". In fact they generated a huge surplus, workers paying in far more than was being paid out. Did the government invest the money so that it would be there when the system went in red. Well yes but they invested it in themselves, which means they handed themselves this large pile of paper of worthless paper and just spent it.
Especially under the Bush administration with his tax cuts for the wealthy, the Social Security suprplus is for all practical purposes being used to defray the cost of a tax cut for the wealthy. Working people are paying steep and inescapable payroll taxes, often from declining income, while corporations and the wealthy are paying less and less of the tax burden every year.
So one day when Social Security really hits the red what is going to happen:
A. The government will borrow even more money to cover the shortfall
B. The government will raise taxes again, and they wont raise income taxes, they will raise payroll taxes on workers in a furtherance of the regressive tax system
C. They will raise the retirement age and cut benefits which is another way of screwing working people out of your money.
You want to fix Social Security/Medicare then set the tax rate each year to match the outlay so they are by definition always solvent and never generating a surplus. Generating surpluses and fearmongering over insolvency just prove its a scam by the government to grab more money from working people to throw away.
FDR may have had working people in mind when they started Social Security though back then very few people actually made it to retirement age so it was kind of scam. But thanks to the corruption of our politicians in Washington its actually turned in to a scheme to milk workers of hard earned wages and transfer them in to the pockets of the wealthy.
"$25billion certainly is not"
That is $25 billion over five years. Now you are all the way up to $5 billion a year and then you have to resort to the shady nether regions of "indirect investment estimates". That is like a weeks worth of America's trade deficit.
"Like China wants the UN to start poking its nose into Chinese affairs anymore than they already are."
Here you are showing how clueless you are. If the Chinese starts picking up the U.N.'s tab why would they start poking around more in their internal affairs. Chances are the U.N. would poke less in the affairs of its major benefactor. This statement sounds kind of like it has a undercurrent of desperation because you've started to think about the adverse consequences to the U.S. if it got its wish and was actually thrown out of the U.N. so you are FUD'ing the concept.
The Chinese take the long view. I wager if they saw the chance to gain greater influence over the U.N. and to replace the U.S. as its leading contributor it would pony up $2-5 billion a year in a heart beat. The Chinese would pay it for the same reason the U.S. pays it, control and power.
"Having lived in Canada, you of all people should be aware of what would happen to the Canadian economy if the US was somehow forced to its knees. And if it came down to it, backs against the wall sort of thing..yes, I believe the US would invade Canada for its oil plus use its military to break any world embargo."
Just because I lived in Canada for a while doesn't actually mean I care when arrogant American assholes do what they normally do, and threaten to solve their problems at the end of a gun barrel.
You might not have noticed but your post is a case study in why the world increasingly despise America and Americans who think like you apparently do. Your arrogant and your first approach to solving every problem is waving your dick in the air.
"do you think the oil flow will just keep on a'coming if you kick the US out?"
Uh yea, the U.S. doesn't have any kind of monopoly on oil field technology as much as you would like to think they do. You are just showing your arrogance again, you really think the world can't survive without the U.S. and probably be a better place. Iraq oil production would probably go up if the U.S. got out, because the insurgents would probably stop blowing it up on a daily basis.
"If you kicked all of the US workers in the Saudi Oil fields alone, do you think they could keep up their production levels?"
Who cares if they do, if at the same time you cut off oil to the U.S. it would be a net gain for the world. Americans, who insanely spend 2 and 3 hours a day driving from the suburbs, usually solo, to their jobs are single handedly squandering a disproportionate share of a precious resource.
The facts in front of you are the Bush administration sold this war to the world based on Iraq possessing WMD's, and having ties to 9/11 and Al Qaeda. Neither of these were true. its revisionism to make out like it was really about "Freedom and Democracy" and because Saddam liked to build palaces.
You are missing two critical fact about Saddam's obstruction of the WMD inspection regime.
A) When the war was actually launched he was cooperating with U.N. inspectors, the inspectors had to flee the country ahead of the invasion.
B) The CIA has after billions of dollars spent and a year and a half of unfettered searching found no WMD's so apparently as troubled as it was, the sanctions worked.
The bottomline is when the time came for the U.N to authorize the invasion of Iraq it didn't, so as a result, the U.S. invasion was illegal under current international law. Either you abide by UN votes or you don't in which case you should get out, instead of adhering to the decisions you like and ignoring the ones you don't. Building consensus is hard, it usually ends in everyone being unhappy but its usually better than unilateralism.
It appears the U.N.'s judgement was in fact right because they didn't buy the U.S. propaganda that Saddam was on the verge of giving a nuclear bomb to Al Qaeda.
The fact that Saddam was a prick and built palaces is no justification for preemptive warfare. Before the first Gulf War and sanctions Iraq was in fact a pretty prosperous place. It was a secular state versus an extremist Islamic state like Saudi Arabia or Iran. Yes Saddam was a two bit dictator but the world is full of those. If the U.S. wanted to take him down they should have done it in the first gulf war when they had a fresh justification. If they would done it then it would have saved the lives of millions, for example the lives of the Kurds and Shia's George H.W. Bush encouraged to revolt and then turned his back on.
"I'm wondering how much aid the U.S. has given your country through the years."
I'm American, though I'm increasingly embarrassed to admit it. The chump change the U.S. hands out in foreign aid doesn't even register against what its sucked out of the world over the years. The World Bank and IMF in particular hand out billions of dollars most of which disappears into the pockets of corrupt dictators, and leave the country and its people deeply in debt, worse off, and at the mercy of the tyranny of the IMF's economic dictates. I'm willing to bet you the third world would be a better place if the IMF never existed. It is just another tool by the U.S. to acquire control over poor nations.
Yea why should it care, why doesn't it just get out. Because the U.S. actually cares in a massive way about the U.N. as a forum for the U.S. to arm twist the rest of the world in to doing its bidding. Its not real successful at it, and less so each year under the Bush administration, but I assure you if the U.S. were actually faced with be cutting off from throwing its weight around in the U.N., and were, in particular, denied its security council veto the U.S. would freak.
All you U.N. haters in the U.S. are blowing smoke, nothing more. You deserve to get your wish.
"You forgot D. Figure out how to make up for ~25% of the UN's budget."
The UN spends according to one source $10 billion a year. What is the United States' cut when it bothers to pay, a couple billion dollars a year. Its chump change. The U.S. is the one that makes a lot more out of it than reality justifies. China, with its new found prosperity could pick up the difference in a heart beat.
Your ecomonic threats are hot air. Throwing the U.S. out of the U.N. would have nothing to do with economics and markets until and unless it escalated to full scale military or economic conflict. The U.S. is in fact more dependent on the rest of the world than the other way around. The U.S. despite its wealth is the world's biggest debtor nation, not just consumer but, in trade, production and government deficits. If places like China and Japan stopped buying treasuries and dollars the U.S. would be in an instant fiscal crisis. If China decided to shut off the container ship traffic to the U.S. the U.S. economy would crater. Its lost on the Bush administration but budget and trade deficits make your country very vulnerable to the whims of other nations.
"but the consequences of being right hurt you just as much as it hurts the US."
I'm American not European though I lived in Canada for years and am aiming to get out of America next year if it stays its current course.
It would be a trauma if the U.S. economy were sliced out of the world, but the U.S. would suffer far more than the rest of the world. America doesn't actually produce anything any more. Its wealth is predicated on past glory, service industries and controlling wealth and shuffling it from one pile to another. The nations that produce things like manufactured goods, electornics, steel and oil are where the real productivity and new wealth lies. If the world switched to the Euro as the dominant currency, especially for oil that would deal a mighty blow to American arrogance. If oil producers embargo the U.S. again the U.S. would be devastated far worse than it was in the 70's. The producers wouldn't really even miss the U.S. oil market because China is clamouring for more oil every day and there is a global shortage. That would be one way to bring down global oil prices, just shut off the supply to the U.S.
The only real leverage the U.S. has in the world is its military.
In recent years, especially since 9/11, the FBI has expanded itself in to a global police force. They are quite proud of it, here is their web page where they brag about it.
"Office of International Operations (OIO). OIO now supports some 200 FBI employees in 45 Legats worldwide and hundreds of Agents rotating in and out of temporary assignments overseas."
"Thanks to the foundations laid by the Liaison Section beginning six decades ago, we now have solid working relationships with a range of colleagues in every part of the world, pursuing terrorist, intelligence, and criminal threats with international dimensions. It's no exaggeration to say that the FBI is a global organization for a global age."
Next time you hear Republican's/Conservatives rail about the UN and world government stop and think a minute. They aren't really complaining about the idea of a world government, they are only complaining about who runs it. They want to run it, out of Washington, out of the oval office and at the moment that means they want George W. Bush to run the world.
The bureaucracy at the U.N. is deeply flawed and a good case can be made against it running the world. But instead should the world be run by a religious extremist elected by a tiny percentage of the world's population and whose main goal in life is to enrich and empower that tiny minority at the expense of the rest of the world.
If you don't think the U.S. is angling for a global empire just read the above description of the FBI. Consider the U.S. now has troops in more than a hundred nations, along with big and growing DEA and CIA contigents, and of course the NSA is spying on all communications on the planet. The U.S. also spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined and that spending is accelerating, not slowing, though most of those conventional military forces are of little value against the Al Qaeda threat. The Bush administration is also actively developing new tactical nukes with the expressed intent of bestowing upon itself the privilege of being the only nation on the planet with the license to use nuclear weapons in otherwise conventional wars.
And of course add in the U.S. has bestowed upon itself the right to use preemptive aggressive warfare to take down any sovereign government it so chooses, with or without any valid justification for the action. All they need is to lay an accusation the nation might someday be a threat to the U.S. which is a charge that can be laid against any nation.
One can only hope that Bush and company are thrown out and Kerry doesn't pursue the same path, which is certainly in doubt on both scores.
If bush stays in power, or any U.S. government continues down the current course, the rest of the world really needs to consider forming a global alliance to counter the United State's imperial ambitions, unless you want extremist Christians running the entire planet, and forcing their "unique" idealogy on you.
Probably one of the best things the UN, and its members nations, could do at this point to give the U.S. reciprocal treatment in a three phase plane:
A. Move the UN headquarters out of New York and to Europe without giving the U.S. the option to veto in the security council
B. Place the U.S. on probation to end its imperial ambitions or be removed from the security council
C. If U.S. behavior continuesand eject the U.S.from the U.N. all together.
Maybe the Republicans will dance with joy at getting out of the U.N but I wager when they see their power and influence in the U.N. being eliminated they will freak and suddenly develop a passion for it.
I'd really like to see how much the U.S. likes being totally isolated and being the global pariah its current policies have called for. Their are obvious feasibility problems with this, since Britain, Italy and Australia would oppose it but I'm not sure how many other nations actually would.
"But the tax code encourages chicanery so that companies can avoid paying taxes."
I'd have to refresh my memory but I should add I'm pretty sure the vehicles Enron was using may have been, on the surface, tax shelters but they quickly turned in to tools for concealing debt, creating imaginary profits, and tools for the Fastow's, and their friends, to transfer money from Enron in to their pockets. It was classic corruption and not really just tax sheltering run amuck.
You seem to be arguing that we erase all the tax codes and accounting regulations and corruption would disappear. The key question is how do you have accounting in a completely deregulated world. Accounting requires a set of rules, regulations or accepted practices. Unless you compel everyone to play by the same accounting rules you wont be able to really assess the health of any company or establish its worth. Accounting is, to my thinking, by definition a form of regulation.
"Energy and defense are probably the most regulated businesses there are after banking, so these don't serve as examples of problems with the free market."
In the case of Energy and Enron, many problems sprang out of the fact they capitalized on an environment which had been heavily regulated, and was transitioning to deregulated, especially since the regulating agency FERC was frequently looking the other way thanks to the Bush administrations and their closeness to executives at Enron. You might argue if it had been a truly free market the extortion that took place in California wouldn't have happened. I would argue it was precisely because the markets had been freed, and regulators were missing in action, and corrupt traders decided to exploit it.
Enron, Dynegy and others colluded to create artificial shortages and extreme high prices. The only way a truly free market would have solved the problem would have been for an "honest" company to come on scene and sell California electricity at fair prices. As long as all the available suppliers colluded to create an artificial shortage for an essential commodity they could charge exorbinant prices and the consumer was screwed.
This is the most common tactic of unregulated monopolists, oil companies being a sterling example. Through merger and acquisition, or collusion, you reduce the number of suppliers, and the suppliers that remain make secret pacts to divide the market and charge artificially inflated prices, they all make more money than if they were engaging in free market competition. As long as the barrier to entry is high and they keep any new competitors that aren't part of the pact from entering the market consumers are powerless unless a regulator intervenes.
As far as the defense sector is concerned it is heavily regulated but it is supposed to be heavily regulated to insure fair competition for government contracts. In practice corruption is eliminating the competition as is a steady string of mergers which has dramatically reduced the number of defense contractors. It is again a sector approaching monopoly. Most sectors of the American economy are. There are now a very few contractors left. The government is to the point it has to award one contract to Boeing and the next to Lockheed to maintain the pretense there is competition. In fact they is very little left and the end result is the consumer, the U.S. tax payer in this case is being screwed.
""Predatory pricing" isn't sustainable in the long run, and while it lasts the consumer reaps the benefit of cheaper goods and services."
It doesn't have to be sustainable in the long run. It just has to be sustained long enough to bankrupt a smaller competitor, or so weaken them that they acquiesce to a merger. I'm thinking we should dig up some references on Standard Oil and Rockefeller. You'll see a case study in what is likely to happen in a "free" market. Standard Oil either bought or destroyed every competitor until it acheived a monopoly.
One problem with people who argue for these theoretical totally free markets is they aren't possible. There is always going to be regulation its just a question of how much. When J.D. Rockefeller was dynamiting his competitors wells was that something that shouldn't be regulated? Was it the duty of the owner of the dynamited well to defend it from his competitors?
"Do you really think that regulations are made with your benefit in mind?"
In the case of antitrust regulation they are most definitely designed with the consumer in mind. They sprung out of the progressive movement at the turn of the last century which was a peoples movement the likes of which we are unlikely to see again. The only reason you may doubt they are for our benefit is unfortunately the politicians and lawyers tasked to enforce them are frequently corrupted or ineffective so they aren't enforcing them.
The regulations FERC was tasked to enforce in the energy market would have prevented the California energy crisis but for the fact that the Bush administration, no doubt at the request of Ken Lay, sat on their hands while Enron was screwing California in an attempt to make enough money to bail them out of the hole they were in.
Good for you if its not that way where you work. You're lucky. What do you mean by "surrounded by successful people well past 30". Any of them over 40 and not on a management track? How old are you? I wage you are young. When I was young I didn't perceive the Logan's Run nature of the tech industry. Your best strategy is to score big, early, and get out. What kind of company do you work for? I'm doubting its a startup.
"When will people get over the illusion that because the current younger generation has greater access to technology, that automatically makes them brainiacs."
Age discrimination has little to do with this. A university isn't the one and only place you learn the skills you need to do your job. Chances are you will be forced to learn new skills on the job year in year out anyway, or at least you will if you are any good.
The real dynamics of age discrimination is very similar to outsourcing. The older you are the higher your salary, so you have to have much higher productivity to justify your salary. You also hit a glass ceiling in the company job descriptions if you stay on a technical track, some companies are good at continuing to incentivize you when this happens, others let you hit it and your career stalls unless you are "smart" and jump to a management track.
The older you are the less likely you are to be suckered in to working 80 hour weeks for 40 hours pay, especially to compensate for the mistakes of incompetent management. You are also less likely to be tolerant for incompetent management because you've seen it before and you know how and why its bad and how the staff pays for it, and the incompetent manager usually doesn't.
You also become less tolerant over time of senior executive who don't work very hard but loot all the options and bonuses and screw their staff. The discrepancy between executive compensation and worker compensation has reached a truly disturbing and historical multiple.
As you age there is also a fair chance you've been through one or more projects that have severely burned you out and until you've been there you don't appreciate the permanent damage it does to you, most managers do though.
To put it another way younger works tend to be more gullible. Most employers like gullible workers.
If you read the link on Google it says, for example:
"The strategy has led to a work force with an average age under 30 and with less than 2 percent of employees over 40, according to the claim. Google employed slightly over 1,600 people in 2003."
I'm pretty sure the employees over 40 are the senior executives and financial people.
When you hit 40 and if you are still a programmer or sysadmin you may be singing a different tune unless you are very good or lucky. If you are just hacking code there a plenty of young people that can do it just as well, are willing to work longer hours, for less pay and benefits, and their insurance is cheaper.
Maybe because its a private corporation created by the Democratic and Republican parties with the explicit goal of shutting third party candidates out of the political process, as they are doing in so many ways now.
The two parties joined together to sieze control of the debates from the League of Women Voters using this private corporation. The League wasn't always the greatest defender of democracy but they were better than the current two party corporate monopoly on public debate.
I think it would be OK for a private corporation to run debates as long as they buy the airtime for them from the networks as they do for campaign commercials and as Ross Perot did for his infomercials. If the networks are giving them 4 1/2 hours of free air time, especially networks broadcasting on publicly controlled airwaves, I'm pretty sure they should be required to allow any viable candidate access to the debates or give them equal time. Viability is easy to determine, is the candidate on the ballot in enough states to theoretically win the election.
Of course the two party monopoly has a solution there too. They send out a small army of lawyers, state by state, as they are doing against Nader, in an effort to keep third party candidates from getting on the ballot at all. The Dem's lawyer are apparently contacting people gathering signatures to get Nader on the ballot and briefing them on the legal consequences should any of the signatures they collect prove to be fraudulent, to put it another way they are threatening people with jail time for trying to exercise their supposed right to "Freedom and Democracy", to have a choice, or to run for office. Our constitution doesn't specify a two party system and I'm pretty sure anyone who meets the basic criteria to be President outlined in the constituion, has the right to run for office and it should be extremely illegal for the two party monopoly to block it. To put it another way the DNC and RNC have no right to decide who can and can't run for office.
The two party monopoly us using their control of state legislators to create unreasonably high barriers to gain access to the ballot. For example the Greens were disbanded as a party in Indiana because they didn't garner 3% of the vote in an off year election, and are forced in to the difficult process of gathering valid signatures to get on the ballot until they garner 3% again.
The U.S. has turned in to an embarrassment to democratic principles. Any of you in other Democratic countries look to America to see how not to do it, and to what happens when you get complacent and let two corrupt, morally bankrupt parties monopolize the system. If there were an honest and viable third party, with an intelligent, charismatic candidate on the ballot, with funding and access to the media, there is a real danger people would turn to it in droves. The two major parties know that so they snuff out every viable alternative at every turn.
So voters in America have no option, they have to choose between one bankrupt party or the other, choos between the lesser of two evils...voters in America are screwed. You know your screwed when both of your Presidential candidates are wealthy, privileged, spoiled prepsters, both born with a silver spoon in their mouths, both Yale graduates, both members of Skull and Bones, the secret society of the elite of the elite. In a country with 300 million people what are the odds both of your presidential candidates would be so nearly identical, both drawn from the same secret society, of the elite, with 800 living members.
The U.S. desperately needs a new Progressive movement. It sprung out of an era in the late 1800's and early 1900's when robber barons and corporations were destroying the lives of most Americans just as they are today. Political corruption was rampant as it is today. Corporations were rapidly merging in to monpolies to the detriment of everyone but th
"Corruption is almost by definition inefficient, so corruption tends to get weeded out."
I'm inclined to say you are pretty naive.
Could you provide some evidence to support your assertion. Corruption is almost always very profitable until and unless you get caught at it. You need look no further than Enron, Worldcom and Halliburton. Until they got caught Enron and Worldcom were wildly successful. Halliburton continues to enjoy success though their corruption has been exposed numerous times. Its hard for them to fail when their political connections and use of crony capitalism(a.k.a. corruption) insures a steady stream of very lucrative no bid contracts from the U.S. Government, which happens to be run by one of their own, which is a form of corruption too, since it translates directly in to favoritism.
Corruption translates in to using influence and bribes to obtain lucrative contracts at the expense of your competitors.
Corruption translates in to manipulated financial reports that make your company look like a superstar in the equity markets, it shoots to the moon and all the shareholders make a killing as long as they cash out at the right time, and move the proceeds out of range of law enforcement.
The only risk in corruption is in getting caught. When that happens then you may loose everything depending on your ability to ride it out.
If corruption were the losing proposition you say it is, it wouldn't be so prevalent. I'm willing to conjecture that on both small and large scale corruption is probably a dominate, if not the dominant, force in most markets.
"Under a free market, the inefficient tend to get eliminated, replaced, by the efficeient."
Unfortunately under truly free markets the highest efficiency is almost always attained by the largest corporation thanks to the economy of scale. They in turn quickly dispose of competitors either by merging with them, or destroying them with predatory pricing and tactics which a large company with deep pockets, think Microsoft, can usually sustain better than a small company. Left on its own its a near certainty capitalism will lead to one large monopoly dominating each market and then one monopoly will ultimately dominate the whole economy. Globalization is making this outcome ever more likely, regulation is the only thing likely to stop it.
Wouldn't be surprised if he can add an age discrimination suit in to boot. 63 is pretty old for a programmer and he was 2 years from retirement and getting on Medicare. I wonder if he was screwed out of retirement benefits too.
Not sure if the propensity for age discrimination is as high in civil service as the private sector. In the private sector it would be a near certainty that his age played in to the decision. With the sky rocketing cost of health insurance alone private employers have developed a strong incentive to get rid of older employees, especially those with health problems, and they will use the first convenient excuse available to do it.
It reminds me of the case of Brian Reid, the 54 year old exec at Google who was fired right before the IPO was announced, and was screwed out of millions in stock options, because he didn't fit in Google's "youthful culture". The person firing him was stupid enough to say that.
It kind of sad trend especially in high tech, that you are pretty much used up and expendable when you hit 30, and are certainly done for by 40, unless you've brown nosed your way in to a VP position or start your own company. When you hit 50 or 60, people like this asshat boss are looking for any excuse they can you to ax you and hire someone young and pretty, who is less likely to complain, has no seniority and will work for peanuts.
""Not that bad" quite literally means "good""
No it doesn't, "Not bad" means "good", you insert "that" in it and you are saying it wasn't "good" but it wasn't "bad" either.
You are the one that is completely missing something here, as the other two replies to your post point out. Unless you have an "agenda", give it up.
If you want an example of "contradiction" so you understand the concept in the future:
Cheney on Meet the Press: "It's been pretty well confirmed, that he(Atta) did go to Prague and he did meet with a Senior Official of the Iraqi Intelligence service.""
Sometime later in a CNBC interview after it had been thouroughly established Atta, the leader of the 9/11 plot, never met Iraqi Secret Service in Prague:
CNBC: "You have said in the past that it was quote "pretty well confirmed."
Cheney: "No, I never said that. Never said that. Absolutely not."
Now that is an example of a contradiction.
"I suspect you may be a Kerry supporter... ;-p"
Well you guessed wrong. Gotta love America, you are either Repubulican or Democrat and there is no third option. The only thing I'll say in Kerry's favor is he is the lesser of two evils compared to the crony capitalists and liars currently occupying the White House, though just barely. Kerry is a prep school elitist, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Yale Grad, Skull and Bones exactly like little George, sure to serve the elite first and the people second if at all. There isn't really a dimes worth of difference between them deep down. The American people were denied much choice in this election when Kerry locked up the nomination.
All I can say about the rest of your post is its straight out of the Bush propaganda book, which is little more than trying to explain away why invading Iraq wasn't a war based on lies when it clearly was. "Oh sure we lied about all the original reasons for it but we are bringing "Freedom and Democracy" to the world, and thats what God put me on Earth to do, he told me himself, so its OK, trust me, lock and load".
If you were to really apply this strategy here is what you need to do. You need to take out the governments of:
- Saudi Arabia
- Pakistan
- Egypt
- United States
The first two, in particular, have for years worked with, funded and harbored muslim extremists. When the Taliban fell the U.S. had to let Pakistan evacuate hundreds of its secret service and military people from Afghanistan that were working with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The tribal area of Pakistan is still Al Qaeda's home base and they are largely unhindered by the Pakistan government there. Pakistan's military seldom goes in there except to put on a show to keep the American's happy. Pakistan is harboring Al Qaeda far more than Saddam ever did.
The first three on my list are dictatorships, and the forth is heading that way. Why don't we take them down because, I'll tell you because those dictators are our friends, and the Saudi's own a big piece of the American economy. While your at it our biggest trading partner China is a dictatorship and Russia is pretty much back to one. Why don't we take them out if "Freedom and Democracy", at the point of a gun, is the solution to the worlds problems.
Pakistan has the single biggest proliferater of nuclear weapons on the planet. It appears they single handedly jump started the nuclear weapons programs in North Korea and Iran. The Bush administration likes to brag about the great work they did busting up the A.Q. Khan. They forget to mention the let the ring run for years, Pakistan's current government was thouroughly aware of it too, and its done grievous damage on the nuclear proliferation front. The forget to mention A. Q. Khan received a full pardon in Pakistan, is free as a bird, wealthy, and a revered hero in the Muslim world for giving the Muslim world the bomb. By contrast we leveled Iraq and jailed Saddam over a vague supsicion of nuclear proliferation, though Iraq didn't have any nuclear program, let alone actually proliferate nuclear technology to rogue states or terrorists.
Saddam was a secular dictator, Iraq was unique in the Arab world in that its men didn't have beards. Why, because Saddam outlawed them as a way to obstruct fundementalist Islam. He in fact aggressively suppressed fundementalist Islam, he gave women more equality than they got in the rest of the Arab world, and their rights are rapidly eroding in the new Iraq which is rushing towards an Islamic government. It defies logic for Al Qaeda and Saddam to have worked together, Saddam was an infidel in the eyes of Al Qaeda, and Saddam hated fundamentalists.
Despite all of your rambling about "Freedom and Democracy" its going to take a miracle for Iraq to not end up with:
- An islamic government, potentially a harsh one modelled after Iran
- A puppet government like Allawi's installed by the U.S. through rigged elections. You wer
Christ there is no contradiction there. "Well attendance was not that bad." is an extremely relative term and its depends on your idea of what "bad" is. It in no way, shape or form suggests he had a stellar/perfect attendance record in fact is suggests his attendance was not great, it just wasn't THAT BAD. "He missed quite a few" says exactly the same thing. He did miss some classes but he did show up most of the time, if his attendance was bad he would have said "he missed a lot of classes" and "his attendance was bad".
I'm dumbfounded you all are willing to hang this guy's credibility out to dry over this zealous parsing of two very vague phrases. I sure wish you could be so zealous about Bush administration statements about Saddam's ties to 9/11 and his WMD's all of which have proven to be outright lies, lies that have gotten a lot of people killed. Even worse they are at various times denying they said them or are still making the same assertions in the face of overwhelming reality. If you want to parse some statements and paint some people as liars why don't you work those over because they weren't even remotely vague and are increasingly, provably false.
OK I'll say it again, there isn't any real contradiction between those two statements, I'm baffled why you think there is unless you are REALLY reaching for something that isn't there. It sure as hell isn't "obvious".
The original poster was clearly out to trash a Harvard Professor for having an "agenda" and all his fellow professor though a guilt by association and his case simply isn't there. He's pretty obviously out to defend his man Bush. You come along and support him, and again your arguement just isn't there, and I'm baffled why your trying to make it.
Maybe you could tell me what your motivation is.
Those two statements aren't contradictory, "not that bad" is a polite way to say his attendance wasn't the greatest, so is "he missed quite a few".
You are reading a lot more in to those two lines than I think most reasonable people would. To put it another way I think you may be the one with the agenda here. Apparently its to try and discredit Harvard Business School profs, by making one of them, Tsurumi out to be a liar. Unfortunately nothing you've shown so far makes your case.
Are you upset a bunch of smart people banded together to criticize your president? Is the cognitive dissonance thing kicking in, as its want to do with Bush fanatics.
I'm pretty sure Bush's head is his least vulnerable and least used part of his anatomy. I wager Bush uses his balls in place of his brain so I'm guessing he must wear a bullet proof jock strap. Anyone have photos with bulges down that way?
Uh, where in this did you prove anything Tsurumi said was untrue?
"My daddy got me into the guard despite the waiting list"
George's dad did get him in the guard ahead of a waiting list with 500 or so candidates, there was only a handful of openings. Even worse George outright flunked the aptitude test, and should have been disqualified immediately. Instead he was pushed to the head of the list over people who actually passed the aptitude test.
The only question here is if George had the bad judgement to brag about it. Privileged kids, and I went to college with a bunch of them, often do brag about their privilege.
"Tsurumi: Well attendance was not that bad. But his attention span was very short."
Uh, I imagine most professor can assess the attention span of their students. This doesn't qualify as a smear campaign/agenda.
"How many times did George Bush come drunk to your class, as a student?"
Its no secret George was a massive partier during this period to put it politely. To be impolite about it he was probably an alcoholic, cocaine abuser and a skirt chaser. Its a near certainty he did go to class hungover, most college students do, and its certainly plausible he may have gone to class under the influence. Again you haven't got made a case that Tsurumi was being untruthful. What he is saying is plausible and you can't prove its not, unless maybe you can find someone with sterling credentials in all the same classes who disputes him.
Either Tsurumi doesn't like Bush and has an agenda or Bush had deep character flaws especially around this time. He and his whole family admit he was a very troubled young man, at least until he quit being a drunk, quit doing Cocaine, found Jesus and decided he was going to be President though he clearly isn't qualified for the job.
My favorite Bush quote of the week, when is in White tie and tux giving a speech to the "the haves and the have-mores." Bush smirks: "Some people call you the elite. I call you my base."
Its bad enough that most politicians serve the elite and not the people, but George had the poor judgement to admit it in front of a camera, smirk and make a joke out of it. This is not a person who should be President of the United States.
I'd have to agree its unlikely it was a wire, or if it was the person that was coaching him over it was as brain damaged as Bush.
If its a bullet proof vest then it tends to suggest Bush and his Secret Service are paranoid chicken shits. He was inside a tightly controlled auditorium, and I imagine its a given everyone was screened on the way in. I doubt you could find a much safer venue.
He is routinely in campaign appearances in shirt sleeves where I doubt he's wearing a vest and he has people 360 around him.
If it is a bullet proof vest I guess its indicative of how afraid of Democrats he is. In his campaign appearances only loyal Republican's are allowed. Here half the people in the hall were Democrats so apparently George is deathly afraid for his life in the presence of Democrats.
I'm compelled to think this may be further proof that Bush is a paranoid sociopath after having lived the life of a bubble boy for the last 4 years.
Sure try to make a joke out of it.
You may recall Bush/Cheney claim the terrorists hate us for our "Freedom and Democracy". They have also, at various times, said we can't beat the terrorists and this war may never end. This was not an acceptable state of affairs, so they've been compelled to find a solution and it is amazing in its elegance and simplicity.
If they get rid of all the "Freedom and Democracy" the terrorists will no longer have a reason to hate us. Peace and victory will ensue.
Don't you love the news today, the Bush administration is apparently claiming some guy in Iraq surfed the internet in July and got floor plans to some obscure small town schools in America. Three months later they are putting out all points bulletins that America's schools are in grave danger, they are advised to place locks on every window and door, immediately, and they are strongly advised to allow only one point of entry to every campus in the nation, presumably using liberal amounts of razor wire as necessary to achieve this end. As Jeff Foxworthy would put it, "You know you are in police state"...
Its a month before an election and and the campaign strategy of the incumbents is amazing in its simplicity, stoke as much fear as humanly possible in the heart of every American. Does this qualify as one of probably many October Surprises we'll see from the Bush administration in order to insure reelection.
"It is unclear to Indymedia how and why a server that is outside the US jurisdiction can be seized by US authorities."
This is simply explained. It is thanks to the fact that, especially since 9/11, the FBI has expanded itself in to a global police force. They are quite proud of it, here is their web page where they brag about it.
"Office of International Operations (OIO). OIO now supports some 200 FBI employees in 45 Legats worldwide and hundreds of Agents rotating in and out of temporary assignments overseas."
"Thanks to the foundations laid by the Liaison Section beginning six decades ago, we now have solid working relationships with a range of colleagues in every part of the world, pursuing terrorist, intelligence, and criminal threats with international dimensions. It's no exaggeration to say that the FBI is a global organization for a global age."
You see the disturbing thing about it is:
A) Say you are fed up with the fact the U.S. is turning in to a police state. In the old days you would become an ex pat and find some place better to live. Well its becoming increasingly hard to find places in the world where the American police state doesn't have a DOD, CIA, NSA and FBI presence.
B) They are trampling most international law on jurisdiction and extradition. Really the only thing stopping it is if each nation tells them to go to hell and defends their sovereignty. Unfortunately a host of nations are either:
- partners in the war on terror and giving each other a blank check to run amuck on the law enforcement front
- bribed/blackmailed by the U.S. especially through the IMF and World Bank
- easily coerced by an unmatched U.S. military which has declared its fondness for preemptive invasion (Iraq) and government topplings(Haiti).
It is, for example, a major new initiative on the part of Ashcroft to hunt down American sex tourists in places like Central America. It is a noble goal on the face of it to hunt down pedophiles, the problem is when you are in a foreign country you are supposed to answer to their laws and law enforcement agencies first, and the FBI should in fact have absolutely no jurisdiction with extradition being the only avenue, and that is normally only if you are wanted for something you did in the U.S. The FBI has increasingly decided you can be made to answer to American law no matter where you are on the planet. It is quite chilling when you think about it because it increasingly means no one can escape America if it continues down its current path to nutcase-dom and dictatorship.
I wouldn't count on it depending on the country. If someone starts launching what are in effect ballistic missiles from some random country, against the wishes of the U.S., I assure you the U.S. will interfere in a hearbeat. The U.S. is routinely going into orbit over North Korea's missile launches and their trajectory isn't much different from these, and this vehicle is way more maneuverable. I wonder how it would fare against Little George's missile defense system.
Though, I wager if the U.S. tries to kill this off, which I thouroughly expect them to since this program is making NASA and the U.S. government look like chumps, I imagine Russia or China would pick it up in a heartbeat and just tell the U.S. to piss off.
"On the other hand, you have to acknowledge that the private approach is typically to put profits first, last, and mostly in-between, and if that means cutting corners, well what's a few accidents?"
As opposed to NASA, who would NEVER cut corners and have accidents. Where were these agencies for the two shuttle disasters.
NASA ignored the fact that the O rings were failing in the SRB's. They were under political pressure from the Reagan administration to launch the teacher in to space so the President could score some political points, so they ignored the fact that it was one of the coldest days ever in that part of Florida, the launch pad was covered in ice, and the O ring problem would get get worse in cold weather.
Fast forward, they knew the shuttle was struck by big chunks of debris on launch, they knew there was a radar track of something big drifting away from the shuttle on orbit. They didn't follow up as they should have because they were under political pressure to stay on an arbitrary space station launch schedule set by the Bush administration, so they put schedule ahead of safety.
All in all it rings pretty hollow to act like the gubmint is some kind of pillar of safety.
I'd take Rutan's judgement over a bunch of bureaucrats any day. I'm pretty sure they aren't launching over major population centers. I've reached the point I's rather see some brave adventurers taking some chances and doing something instead of NASA which is paralyzed by "safety" and has reached the point that A) it still isn't safe and B) its spending huge sums of moneys and not doing ANYTHING in the manned space program.
So bottomline make sure they are flying trajectories that dont take them over populations centers, I'd think the FAA was already doing that, let the passengers sign waivers and otherwise get the hell out of the way so we can have a space program for a change.
To be honest I'm amazed Rutan isn't being shutdown on WMD and homeland security grounds. As crazy as the current governments is over weapons I'd think a powerful rocket like this, not under the control of the gubmint, would be a major national security threat.