I'll concede the links between Socialism and Fascism are tenuous other than the Fascist party we all know best, were the Nazi's which comes from "National Socialist". If you define the term "Socialist" in the strict left wing sense, then Fascism doesn't fit. If you define it as a huge government intervening in the economy and lives of its citizens, and allow it to have left and right wing forms, then Fascism is the right wing form of Socialism.
I think part of the problem here is the U.S. political and economic system is so completely confused at this point I'm not sure you can cubbyhole it in to any of the traditional definitions. It defies definition. Components of the system seem to be rampant free market capitalism bordering on Libertarianism. But the government intervenes so frequently in those markets you can only refer to it as state capitalism, certainly all the recent bailout and interventions are exactly that, so were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by design. Other components, many dating to FDR, are blatant left wing Socialism, Social Security, Medicare, unions. But this country's massive expenditures on its military and intelligence apparatus, launching aggressive wars based on fabrication(Iraq), pronounced nationalist tendencies, support for right wing dictators the world over, unrestrained warrantless spying, torture, shredding the Constitution and the ignoring basic due process(rendition, arresting and detaining people without charge and denying them access to lawyers, courts or fair trials) are all the hallmarks of a Fascist state, as are the disturbing ties between government and corporations. From Wikipedia:
"Fascism, pronounced, is a political ideology that seeks to combine radical and authoritarian nationalism with a corporatist economic system, and which is usually considered to be on the far right of the traditional left-right political spectrum."
I think Fascism is still probably the closest term we have for the current governments of the U.S., Russia, China and the U.K. Socialist democracy probably applies best to most of the rest of the E.U. since they are mostly harmless nanny states. Don't think there are many actual representative democracies left, or if their are they are tiny(I don't know India well enough to know where it sits).
"And, please stop calling every fiscal policy you don't like a "Ponzi scheme."
I wasn't referring to fiscal policy, I was referring to the housing bubble. It WAS a ponzi scheme, the only other useful term would be pyramid scheme. The people originating all those half million dollars mortgages to hairdressers and gardeners knew they would eventually implode, so did all the mortgage auditors and the bond rating agencies, so did most of the Wall Street banksters who securitized them and sold them off to pension funds and assorted other investors as AAA bonds. There is absolutely NO WAY subprime mortgages to people with either no proof of income, or insufficient income, could ever warrant AAA bond ratings.
All the way through the system people were just cashing in on the front end of the pyramid scheme and were indifferent that a crash was inevitable when all the ARM interest rates ballooned and those gardeners and hairdressers would inevitably default. The whole system was designed to allow people to grab money where none existed, and to screw people at the end of the scheme(mainly bond investors who thought they had bought ultra safe AAA bonds).
The original Internet bubble was just as much a pyramid scheme(there I didn't call it a Ponsi scheme). In case you haven't noticed the U.S. economy is so dysfunctional now the only way it keeps going is through one pyramid scheme after another, borrowing money from the rest of the world, or just printing it. That will probably continue until the rest of the world gets a clue and removes the U.S. dollar as the sole global reserve currency. Charles DeGaulle in the 1960's railed that allowing the U.S. dollar to be the global reserve currency allowed the U.S. to print money, borrow money and generally steal the rest of the world blind. Once the world switches to a different reserve currency, and the world has finally figured out the scam the U.S. was running the last two years, the U.S. wont be able to borrow a plugged nickel, the dollar will implode and the party will be over. Every other country that can't pay its bills ends in the arms of the IMF because they can't just borrow and print like the U.S.. Well not every country, Zimbabwe also tried to print its way out of its economic problems....
"The bulk of the spending increases have been in defense, an area where traditional socialists oppose massive spending and where libertarians support it."
I think you missed the point. I'm not saying our government is "Socialist" in the left leaning, pro worker nanny state form. I'm saying the U.S. is Socialist in the right wing, state capitalism sense(a.k.a. Fascism). I know using that word causes immediate invocation of Godwin, and half the readers thinks its wacko the instant they see the word, but it really is the only term that really applies to the U.S. political/economic system now. It can easily be applied to Russia, China and the U.K. too.
Massive military spending it a hallmark of Fascism, it defines it, it is a mandatory part. The fact that the U.S. has, and spends so much on, such a massive, aggressive military, engaging in aggressive wars (and the invasion of Iraq was classic unprovoked aggression based on fabrication) just helps prove my case. Even better the U.S. also has a gigantic web of intelligence agencies who are increasingly spending more time spying in America than anywhere else furthers my argument. The infamous East German police state had to have an army of people to eavesdrop on a small fraction of its people. Thanks to computers and telecommunications the U.S. can now spy on nearly everyone all the time.
The big problem here is that chances are the NSA is directly tapping all the backbone fiber in the Internet already, and they are building giant new data centers in Utah and Texas to store Yettabytes of data which is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Chances are the NSA is already and will certainly be in the future recording every email, IM, URL GET and POST and phone call flowing through every fiber they manage to tap and they will probably tap them all in this country, in all their allied countries like the UK and Australia, all the ones crossing the oceans, and of course have listened to all the RF bouncing around the planet for decades. They started tapping Soviet undersea copper cables decades ago using submarines so if somehow a telecomm wont let them tap their cables they will probably just do it anyway.
As nearly as I can tell Joe Nacchio, the CEO of Qwest, is the only exec that said no when the Bush administration told the telecoms to let the NSA taps their backbones. They responded with a dubious insider stock trading case against him and threw him in Federal prison to show what happens to people who don't "cooperate". The beauty of American law is just about everyone has cheated on their taxes, traded on an insider stock tip, used illegal drugs, or done something else the government can use against you to force compliance and obedience.
Once they have total surveillance I kind of doubt the government will even need to go to an ISP or a warrant to get access to your inbox. Its really messy for them to have to go to an ISP because telling the sysadmin who the target is risks compromising the "investigation". It is much cleaner and simpler for them to just record EVERYTHING at the backbone so they can data mine it at will, and can hop in the way back machine to see in detail what someone did years ago without relying on an ISP to retain anything.
The NSA is building huge new data centers in Utah and Texas. If TechCrunch is to be believed they will store a "yottabyte" which is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB of data from communication intercepts. You kind of figure that only thing that would require this much storage is they are probably going to record pretty much everything going through every fiber optic cable they can tap, plus all the radio communications they can eavesdrop on with satellites. That would probably be all phone calls, all email, all IM, probably every URL ever computer is accessing.
This will be extremely convenient since:
A) you can data mine it and find all kinds of interesting things, terrorist threats, political dissidents, politicians doing illegal or immoral things which you can use to blackmail them later to make them vote the way you want them to vote. This may have already been done to Jane Harmon who was caught in a warrentless wire tap doing something illegal, influence peddling, with Israeli lobbyists. This might have been used by the Bush administration to force her to back some of their activities since she is on the House Intelligence committee which oversees.... communications surveillance (at least is supposed to if the White House bothers to tell them what they are doing which they didn't when they started this NSA program originally).
B) even if a person isn't of interest now, if they become of interest later, you can hop in the way back machine and see everything they've said and done
It would obviously be problematic for the NSA to do this if there were any warrants required at all. Needless to say the Obama administration is just continuing pervasive spying on everyone and everything started under Bush and this court case, were it to succeed, would be inconvenient since it would almost certainly establish this program is unconstitutional and therefor illegal. Obama is just another in a long line of politicians dedicated to constantly expanding their power and the power of the Federal government. At this point the Federal government is an out of control snow ball rolling going down hill turning in to an avalanche.
I think you are the thick one here. He was implying that the current Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, are already socialist in practice if not in name. and he has a pretty viable argument.
Here is a chart from Wikipedia of the size of the Federal budget for the last 14 years:
* 2010 United States federal budget - $3.60 trillion (submitted 2009 by President Obama)
* 2009 United States federal budget - $3.10 trillion (submitted 2008 by President Bush)
* 2008 United States federal budget - $2.90 trillion (submitted 2007 by President Bush)
* 2007 United States federal budget - $2.77 trillion (submitted 2006 by President Bush)
* 2006 United States federal budget - $2.7 trillion (submitted 2005 by President Bush)
* 2005 United States federal budget - $2.4 trillion (submitted 2004 by President Bush)
* 2004 United States federal budget - $2.3 trillion (submitted 2003 by President Bush)
* 2003 United States federal budget - $2.2 trillion (submitted 2002 by President Bush)
* 2002 United States federal budget - $2.0 trillion (submitted 2001 by President Bush)
* 2001 United States federal budget - $1.9 trillion (submitted 2000 by President Clinton)
* 2000 United States federal budget - $1.8 trillion (submitted 1999 by President Clinton)
* 1999 United States federal budget - $1.7 trillion (submitted 1998 by President Clinton)
* 1998 United States federal budget - $1.7 trillion (submitted 1997 by President Clinton)
* 1997 United States federal budget - $1.6 trillion (submitted 1996 by President Clinton)
* 1996 United States federal budget - $1.6 trillion (submitted 1995 by President Clinton)
Its more than doubled in 14 years and its been done by both Democrats and Republicans. Bush, supposedly the small government Conservative nearly doubled it all by himself in eight years. He not only doubled spending but cut taxes to create staggering deficits. They would have been really staggering earlier if it hadn't been for the housing bubble generating fantasy tax revenue. We don't have that bubble any more which is why deficits are going to be running more than a trillion until we gin up a new bubble(Ponzi scheme).
The U.S. GDP is maybe 14 trillion so the Federal budget alone is more than 20% of the economy. If you count secondary effects from all that spending it could easily be half our GDP now.
The budget deficits are now projected to run over a trillion a year indefinitely which is nearly as much as the ENTIRE federal budget in 1996. Of course the Fed and Treasury have also destroyed the dollar in the same period so a dollar in 1996 was worth a lot more than it is now which is why Gold is now over $1000. Gold has actually out performed the stock market the last couple decades thanks to the last couple years of economic devastation.
And of course in the last two years under both Democrats and Republicans there has been MASSIVE intervention in the economy to bail out Wall Street and Detroit. In so doing they have created massive moral hazard, by allowing giant corporations to do truly awful, incompetent, sometimes criminal things in the mortgage and auto market and just have the government step in to clean up their mess at the expense of ordinary Americans. Banksters pocketed billions and billions of dollars in the process and with collusion of their shills in government like Paulson have completely shredded free market capitalism in this country. They then turned around and have completely gutted all recent attempts to regulate them to keep them from doing it again... and they will do it again.... probably alread
Another interesting article today about Goldman Sach's role in the subprime mortgage fiasco. A former Goldman exec has a tell all book out coming out "The 88 Biggest Lies on Wall Street". You have to take him with a grain of salt because he is probably a scumbag and has just turned to profiteering through his tell all book but I like this money quote:
"It's not just unethical," Talbott said of the chain of profiting subprime players extending from real estate appraisers to Wall Street. "It's totally criminal."
It is entertaining to see one of Goldman's own turn on them, it doesn't happen often.
From mortgage brokers, to appraisers, rating agencies and the big Wall Street banks that securitized all that sub prime garbage as AAA rated bonds, chances are EVERY one involved knew exactly what they were doing, that it was criminal, and it would eventually collapse. They were just pocketing as much money as they could as quickly as they could so they could cash out before the house of cards fell. It was massive organized crime and it was basically the largest Ponzi scheme in histroy, much bigger than Madoff and noone seems to be going to jail for it. Maybe EVERY is a little harsh, it appears some people at Merril Lynch, Citigroup and AIG had absolutely no idea the hole they were digging for themselves and their company though chances are they all still cashed out rich before their companies imploded. I wager Goldman knew exactly what they were doing, and in particular had billions in hedges through AIG to cover them if those bonds went to crap. Unfortunately AIG had hundreds of billions of those derivative contracts and absolutely no capital to cover them so if the government hadn't bailed out AIG, and funneled billions to Goldman Sachs through AIG with no strings attached Goldman would have ended in bankruptcy. Fortunately for Goldman a former Goldman CEO was treasury secretary when the shit hit the fan so he could steer billions to Goldman at tax payer expense to keep them afloat.
That seems like a reasonable attitude towards a game, especially if its not a competitive game, its a just a time wasting affirmation of Skinner's theories on reinforcement and yes you are operating at about the same level as a pigeon.
Me personally I simply will never play a competitive game like Evony where some players gain competitive advantage either by pouring cash in to the game, or falling for scams. If a competitive game developer doesn't make a reasonable effort to maintain a level playing field they are an epic fail and aren't worth playing. Eve and WoW are almost as bad because once a clan, guild or even individual player becomes big, wealthy and entrenched that unlevels the playing field.
Its ridiculously hard to carpet bomb a widely dispersed agrarian country and accomplish anything. Especially one they start digging in and have the cover of mountains and jungles. Afghanistan has mountains, lots of mountains. We dropped more tonnage on the tiny country of Vietnam than we dropped during all of World War II and it accomplished next to nothing. Bombing only works on highly urban, highly industrialized countries with lots of easy high value targets like Germany and Japan. It worked reasonably well in Iraq during the invasion because its a country concentrated in a couple narrow river valleys and had lots of targets(bridges, command and control centers, an actual army). Afghanistan has none of that.
One of the more basic reasons "governing wont work" is that politicians and regulators are easily captured by special interests who have the money, the time, the connections and the motivation to manipulate the government. A few million well placed lobbying dollars and campaign contributions can yield multi-billion dollar windfalls at the expense of the American people.
You kind of have to wonder why the conservative Republicans complain so much about big government because for at least the last 10 years, and really a lot longer than that, they have been the most adept at exploiting it for their own gain. Only reason they are complaining about lately is they aren't in power as of 2006/2008. The potency of their vitriol against big government only spikes when they aren't in power. When they are in power they tend to be more OK with it, and their complaining about is empty rhetoric which acts as cover while they are looting it.
I often shudder to think what this country would be like if the Libertarians won and everything was completely deregulated. Chances are the foxes would devour all the chickens. But, when you see how our government actually works, especially lately, the Libertarians actually have a point. Much of the pillaging and devastation is being aided, abetted or actually initiated by politicians and regulators who have been captured by special interest, so they give legal cover to the pillaging, and trillions of dollars are transferred from unlucky powerless groups to lucky powerful ones. For example, senior citizens are completely looting younger working people to get 20, 30 and 40 years of Medicare and Social Security though they actually paid very little in to the system. Oayroll taxes were jacked up from nothing to 12.5% in the early 80s so most seniors didn't pay anything in but are taking huge sums out.
It is quite possible things might actually work better under real Libertarianism where Wall Street bankers get absolutely no assistance from the Fed, Treasury, Congress or the President. They get no tax shelters, no government backed loan programs and most importantly NO bailouts when they screw up and should fail. The absolute worst thing done in the last couple years was the complete destruction of moral hazard which is the most crucial foundation of Capitalism. If you know that if you fail the government will bail you out you don't have free market capitalism any more, you have state capitalism(i.e. Fascism) which is what I think we have now.
Chances are a few banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs would still end up running the world under Libertarianism but I have reached a point that I would like to see the government get the hell out of it and let them sink or swim on their own. It couldn't be any worst than what we have now.
Unfortunately I've come to the conclusion there is NO political/economic philosophy that actually works in practice. Every one devolves in to some small group acquiring all the wealth and power and screwing it out of everyone else. In some systems its party members and bureaucrats, in others it politicians, and in others its bankers and CEO's. As Shakespeare thoroughly outlines a long time ago, we are a species with vicious tendencies that spiral completely out of control in the people who aspire to power and wealth and there seems to be no way to stop those people.
I think she was talking about the Wall Street bankers and stock brokers who disproportionately come from wealthy families, go to prep schools, get degrees from ivy league schools and then go work at Goldman Sachs, Citi and JP Morgan. They also end being treasury secretaries, on the Federal Reserve and New York Fed (which is the body that actually runs Wall Street though its more like Wall Street runs it) and the President's economic advisors.
If you remember the resignation letter of Andrew Lahde after making a killing of the ivy leaguers and quitting rich:
"The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America."
The U.S. Senate also tends to be a rich kids club and is also the place that tends to do the most looking out for the rich, since one senator can often block legislation in the public interest to the benefit of special interest. John McCain for instance wasn't really rich enough so once he got out of Vietnam he dumped the wife that had stood by him while he was a POW and married a more attractive women who happened to be an heir to a sizable fortune of an Arizona beer distributor, and who were politically connected enough in Arizon to get him elected to the Senate.
And of course the Bush clan are the epitome of the stereotype though they've only been a part of America's new aristocracy for about a century.
One reason Carter, Clinton and Obama were so skewered in the White House is the rich WASP/Jewish aristocracy considers them to be poor trash and not worthy of running their piggy bank. Clinton and Obama in particular had stellar educations but were born to poverty so aren't acceptable by "the establishment".
"Now, we worry far too much about civilian deaths, which just makes it impossible to win a war."
When the Soviet Union was at war in Afghanistan they killed civilians with ruthless abandon. It was a complete disaster. You do it in a guerrilla war/insurgency it just unites the population against you, it drives recruitment for the insurgency, it encourages civilians to hide the insurgency, and when your army is living in the middle of those pissed off civilians it is extremely vulnerable.
Germany and Japan were modern, industrialized, urban societies. Bombing them in to the stone age was doable. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan they found next to nothing worth bombing because Afghanistan was still in the stone age, and certainly was after the Soviets had already bombed them in to the stone age. The insurgents mostly scattered and many escaped in to Pakistan. Trying to carpet bomb a mostly rural country to kill all its civilians would be nearly impossible even if it were a good idea which it isn't.
The fatal flaw in Afghanistan was that the U.S. let Pakistan's tribal areas operate as safe heavens just like they had when the insurgency crucified the Soviet army there. Since the U.S. supplied the insurgency against the Soviets through the Pakistan tribal areas you would think the U.S. would have known what would happen by letting them use them the same way again. It appears between drone strikes and the recent Pakistan offensive into the triable regions they just now might be trying to deny them their safe haven. It remains to be seen if it works. Unfortunately Pakistan's ISI and much of its military are openly allied with the Taliban and have been for decades. The may also be clandestinely allied with Al Qaeda so relying on them to do anything against them is naive at best. They just put on shows so they can get billions more in free money from the U.S.
The other fatal flaw in Afghanistan is you aren't really fighting the Taliban or Al Qaeda, you are fighting about 2000 very local, tribal militias that hate occupiers, have been fighting occupiers since the dawn of time, and they are EXTREMELY good at destroying occupying armies with superior weapons, they've been doing it for thousands of years.
AMaya is the only one I've used. Doubt it would be fast enough for note taking though it outputs MathML so you can drop it straight in to HTML and a browser. It is open source so you can optimize it if you desire.
"As far as the reasons, they claim it was due to grave warnings by the administration about damage to national security. "
Of course that rationale is used to conceal every illegal thing every government does and has been since the dawn of time. If, as a newspaper and beacon of truth and freedom, you have knowledge of government activity that is obviously illegal, prone to massive abusive and is violating basic civil liberties and the Constitution and you let the people perpetrating the crime stop you with that canard you are pretty much useless as a public watch dog. The FISA court is already a rubber stamp for the administration in power, there is no reason for the executive branch to be allowed to completely bypass it other than they pretty much wanted to spy on anyone anytime without restraint.
"It also does not follow that just because a whistleblower came to them that no investigation was involved. I thought there was quite a lot of investigation to corroborate the claims, which would require a significant network of trusted sources within the government."
I wouldn't count on it. That program had the highest classification there was. They weren't even briefing the congressmen responsible for oversight of intelligence activities which was probably illegal in and of itself. Of course if they had briefed the Congressional intelligence authorities it would have leaked immediately. The chances the NY times could have found anyone else in the know who would have corroborated it were slim. Corroboration by anyone other than the White House would have been grounds for yanking security clearance and throwing the person in jail. So the only option they had was take it directly to the Executive branch and ask them to deny or corroborate. Presumably the Bush administration threatened them so they did nothing for a long, long time until the Bush administration was starting to crater after Katrina.
"So your argument is what? Better never than late? Was anyone else even close to revealing it?"
In the case of warrantless wire tapping all indications are the NY Times had the story in 2004 prior to the election and Bill Keller sat on it until December 2005. Would it have made a differences in the 2004 election, probably not, but you never know. I sure wish it had because it would have saved us another four years of abuse, Constitution shredding and incompetence. It was certainly something the American people had a right to know before they reelected the Bush administration and for whatever reason the Times sat on it until a time when revealing it had little effect. I wager they were afraid of and intimated by the Bush administration in 2004 when Bush was riding high in power and popularity, so they waited until after Katrina and Bush popularity had already started to plummet. If so it was pretty spineless.
It also wasn't really NY Times reporting that uncovered it. It was apparently due to whistleblower at the Justice Department, Thomas Tamm. It took some serious guts on his part to risk his career and prison to expose it to the Times and they did nothing with the information for nearly two years.
This is simply not a case for why newspaper journalism shined. It makes a case for why we need whistleblower protection and a reliable avenue for whistleblowers to expose illegal activity in the halls of power. It tends to suggest the NY Times wasn't a very reliable avenue for this.
I'd have to research the other stories to comment, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were also exposed by whistleblowers in the Bush administration fed up with their law breaking more than New York Times reporting. The one really good thing about big newspapers like the Times is they do have lawyers and the ability to fight the government in court to protect whistleblower's identities.
Read up on quantitative easing. It is what the Fed's been doing massively since the crisis. It is printing money though its done electronically. From Wikipedia:
"Quantitative easing is another way to influence monetary policy, only recently begun to be used in the United States. Other countries, such as Japan, have provided a template for some Fed actions. Essentially, quantitative easing provides a method for the central bank to provide funds at lower than zero interest rates, in order to increase the monetary supply and combat deflationary forces. This is accomplished by the Fed purchasing U.S. government debt with newly printed U.S. currency. In essence, the Fed is monetizing the debt. In the current (late 2007 to today) macro-economic environment, the slowing velocity of money has induced U.S. central bankers to pursue a variety of new, and to some radical, policies to produce economic stimulus."
They also allowed Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to acquire bank charters so they have access to this free money to fuel their commodity, stocks and bond gambling. It is helping to fuel the current bubble in stocks, bonds and commodities.
It is inappropriate for investment banks to have access to the discount window. Paul Volcker has been lobbying hard to get the Obama to stop it, but Geitner and Summers being stooges of Wall Street are ignoring him. Discount window access should only be allowed to conservative commercial banks who don't gamble on the stock market. Ever since the repeal of Glass Steagel and they let Citigroup access it, and certainly since they let Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and what's left of Merrill access it they've created massive potential for abuse and for bubble creation.
Go to Wharton or get an MBA from Harvard, Yale or a lesser Ivy League university. WASP or Jewish is probably best. Get in the right fraternity/sorority. Probably helps to be attractive so plastic surgery as required. Skills in Golf and Tennis are mandatory. If you have morals or ethics you need not apply. You need to be willing to lie, cheat, steal or screw your mother for a beloved buck. Watch Oliver Stone's Wall Street, it has apparently turned in to a recruiting tool and career guide to a life of crime on Wall Street, though Stone intended the opposite when he made it.
When you graduate they will probably be waiting to recruit you. Once they hire you, you need to be extremely adept at knowing which asses to kiss and which ones to screw.
Well there was the ties to Al Qaeda thing, also been proved False.
There was the "to get Iraq's oil thing", well if that was it we completely botched that since I think the Chinese have more Iraq oil contracts than the U.S. now. It would take a LOT of oil to pay back the trillion dollars we've squandered there.
There was the "excuse to give huge no bid contracts" to all our Republican connected friends. Check. That one is a winner.
There was the "to bring Democracy to the Middle East". That's iffy at best. We mostly created a Shia dominated, Iran friendly, theocracy with a whiff of disfunctional Democracy. Once we pull our troops out it could crater in to a civil war in a week.
There was the "to kill Saddam" because he tried to kill my dad(George W's dad). That might be a winner.
There was the "my daddy botched the first Gulf War and I have daddy issues" so I had to do it again and prove I'm better than my daddy at the price of $1 trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed.
I could go on... maybe you should tell me the reason for it... I really can't think of any that actually make sense, Mister Anonymous Cowtard?
You should probably consider a nice career in banking and move to Wall Street then. Its not exactly a secret that the big Wall Street banks have pretty much devoured the U.S. economy and they run the government, insuring that their success will be guaranteed by the Congress, the President and his Wall Street friendly administration(same for Dems and Republicans), the Fed (by printing money and giving it to them at zero percent even if it destroys the dollar) and in times of the trouble the U.S. taxpayer. They are a huge percentage of the U.S. economy now and their compensation dwarves pretty much every other career.
I was reading earlier this week the U.S. now has the greatest income inequality in the world except for Singapore and Hong Kong which are tiny city states. Last time we had income inequality at this level was in the 1920's right before the Great Depression. Lord Brian Griffiths of Fforestfach, vice chairman at Goldman Sachs Intl., a life peer under England's nobility scheme, and Christian theorist of "biblically based wealth creation." recently said: "We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all." The dirty little secret is Goldman Sach's keeps all the prosperity and opportunity for themselves and their rich friends, and the rest of us will never see it unless we manage to join their exclusive little club. We've pretty much returned to aristocracy and are certainly in a plutocracy with a tinge of kleptocracy since when Wall Street screwed up they smoothed it over by outright legalized theft from the rest of us.
The article doesn't spell it out but all of America's best and brightest are going to Wall Street and big business, not science. Unless they are idealists or altruists they go there because that's where the easy money is. Its mostly money being produced via elaborate legalized Ponzi schemes but that doesn't change the fact if you make it on Wall Steet you get money for nothing and chicks for free. Whose going to enter the exciting world of Physics when they can have that, at least while the party lasts, and it appears after a brief glitch its back bigger and better than ever.
"What the US needs to get back into the space race is a good old fashioned nose tweaking."
It doesn't seem to be working on the good ole economy front. China is running massive trade surpluses with the U.S., are taking all our jobs, and are seizing control of many of the world's raw materials. If there were any competitive fire left in America's belly it should have surfaced already. You can't really do another Apollo or compete in another space race when you are running trillion dollar trade and budget deficits, and mired in several pointless wars that are consuming what resources aren't going to health care and social security. During the 60's the US was still flush with economic success in the wake of World War II when the rest of the world had been flattened.
The U.S. is starting to more closely resemble an early version of Great Britain, which having lost its empire in World War II and the pounds status as global reserve currency is now mired in debt and can't even support its vastly diminished military or pay its civil servants.
The Washington Post is a pale shadow of the paper that broke Watergate. Personally I stopped reading it about the time they fired Dan Froomkin and their execs thought it was cool to sponsor pay-for-access cocktail parties with politicians. Their online site was showing promise until Katharine Weymouth canned the people making it happen and forced consolidation with their print division which was like mixing oil and water. Last month they issued guidelines forbidding their reporters from using Twitter and other social media which shows their dinosaurish nature. Dan Froomkin is now in charge of the Political section of... the Huffington Post. Jim Brady another Washington Post luminary is starting a new online Washington news site for Politico.
If you want to hop in the way back machine to just before the Iraq invasion, Judith Miller, used the New York Time to shill for her books on WMD's and for the Bush administration to whip up the frenzy about non existent WMD's in Iraq. This has since cost the U.S. about a trillion dollars and thousands of dead and tens of thousands wounded for a lie, which a dead tree journalist helped propagate. Of course the Hearst empire pioneered yellow journalism and shilling to start wars for no reason in 1898, "Remember the Maine", so its not a new phenomena. And of course in 2003 the NY Times also had Jayson Blair who made a career on plagiarized and fabricated stories and it took forever for the Times editors to notice.
So to balance that one Watergate success story everyone cites in these debates there have been multiple recent failures. The U.S. press was pretty much asleep at the wheel during Iraq, Patriot Act abuses, torture, warrantless spying on Americans on a massive scale, etc. The NY Times did break the warrantless wiretap story but only after it had been running for years.
You seem to be waxing nostalgic for old school journalism that doesn't really exist anymore if it ever did. I'd being willing to bet if Woodward and Bernstein were to try to break Watergate today, Nixon would call up the Washington Posts management/editors and it would be killed before it saw the light of day because the management of most papers today are pro establishment and pro corporate interests instead of a beacon of truth and freedom. All the Presiden't men was a product of a handful of unique people who did something amazing and right, it had nothing to do with the actual merits of dead tree journalism.
I too would wax poetic for old school journalism but to think its still even alive or it will flourish in the brain dead environment that is most dead tree newspapers today is optimistic at best. I have to hope the web actually does succeed in producing a beacon for truth and freedom and that it rises above the sea of noise that is the web. Its a long shot but its a lot more likely than hoping for dead tree newspapers or TV networks to be honest stewards of the truth.
I gather AOL is hiring reporters at a furious rate and the plan of the new CEO who came from Google is to make it in to the leader in online Journalism. I wish him well, though my brain has seizures whenever I see the brand he is working under.
Uh, you should have looked at a map. The Shuttle SRB's splash down 160 miles down range, that isn't anywhere close to Miami or St Louis, its in the gulf unless you are launching on a polar trajectory. I doubt Ares or Apollo first stage would be much different. Worse thing about the Gulf, and its a more recent hazard are all the offshore oil platforms.
Russia has launched entirely over land for their entire history though the population in that area is somewhat sparser.
If you add up all launch delays and scrubs it must have cost NASA years in delays and billions of dollars so I doubt Florida really was a great choice hind sight being 20/20.
On top of that they play Russian roulette with every launch with lightning strikes which is a seriously bad thing for vehicles full of explosives and sensitive mission critical electronics, so Florida where severe thunderstorms are a daily occurrence was a dubious choice.
Would also have been a pretty good idea to partner with Mexico and put the launch site further south kind of like Europe did.
The Southern tip of Texas is substantially closer to the Equator than Kennedy is and it would launch over the Gulf for the early part of the flight which is the really dangerous part. Brownsville does get some rain but it not nearly as bad as Kennedy. It will never happen at this point but it would have been a lot better choice than Florida.
There all kinds of good things NASA does especially in it lesser known fringes. JPL is a never ending source of good things. I saw earlier this week one of NASA's best aerodynamicists passed away this week at 88. He slept on a cot in his office at Langley and lived to make things better. He designed the wasp waist on supersonic aircraft making them practical, the supercritical wing and the winglets on the ends of commercial aircraft which dramatically increased speeds and reduced fuel consumption for just about every plane flying.
I'm sure there are probably still good people in NASA's manned space program but the problem is its turned in to a giant self perpetuating bureaucracy and its flaws now far outweigh its benefits. This is a nearly inevitable end for every big bureaucracy not just NASA's.
Which is of course billions of years in the future so your argument is pointless in any context that matters. Overpopulation and its many manifestations which include climate change is a here and now problem and it most definitely does post an immediate existential threat to us as a species and all the other species on the planet. You do know we are exterminating species at a furious rate partially just through massive habitat destruction? Even if you fix CO2 emmissions, if you don't stop population growth our species is still going to crash, and take most of the other species with it, when it runs out of water, food and space, unless there are some huge advances in technology. I am confident bacteria, cockroaches, rats and weeds will survive to start evolution over.
"That's why my proposed solution is to just nuke the entire planet from orbit."
A probably more effective approach would be to prevent Catholicism, Islam and assorted other religions from continuing to promote uncontrolled breeding, and make birth control widely available across the globe. If you stabilize Earth's population or better start it on a gentle downward slope our prospects for long term survival would dramatically improve. Our predominant economic system also works against us, since Capitalism and Capitalism induced greed demand constant growth. It isn't a sustainable economic model on a planet with limited resources. You either have to expand in to space, or you have to adopt an economic model which is sustainable.
"able to kill off all of life"
We have however had numerous extinction events which have wiped out most life. Its also taken hundreds of millions of years for plants to sequester CO2 to its pre-industrialization level. On its current course Man will release it all back in to the atmosphere in less than a thousand years unless we make a major course change. I don't even pretend to know what the actual consequences of that will be, but it is almost certain to result in a dramatic change in our planet. Its almost certain to be a problem that half our population lives at basically the current sea level and we need more habitable space, not less if we continue unrestrained population growth.
"History 101: Mankind's early ventures across the ocean were in search of unclaimed mineral wealth (read: GOLD)."
Not really sure of your point other than yes some explorers were obviously motivated by greed. They did for the most part manage to loot, plunder and infect every culture they encountered and pretty much wiped out every one. The explorers that lasted were not quite so bad. The colonies that stuck on North America were usually people fleeing religious persecution and political oppression in Europe. There have been a host of explorers who did it for adventure, knowledge and more benevolent motives.
"Spelunkers would beg to differ."
You are certainly welcome to live in caves, I'll pass....
"Well, I seem to recall that a recent U.S. president had tried to commit us to colonizing Mars within a few decades"
So did his dad a decade earlier. All they did was proclaim a goal which they knew NASA wouldn't achieve especially with the finite resources allocated and NASA's ability to squander time and money. These are always on a time line so they wont be done until long after they long gone. Call me a cynic but I'm pretty sure most initiatives out of the White House are just a way to buy votes in Florida and Texas, Florid being particularly important. Presidents also need to keep the Congressional delegations of places like Florida, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Maryland, Virginia, Colorado and California. The space program is now mostly just another avenue to distribute pork and create jobs, one of many. Its what happens anytime you build a huge bureaucracy and then let it entrench, bloat and rot. The CIA, DOD, Treasury, DOE, etc. are just as bad. The Dept. of Homeland Security was that way from inception.
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I'll concede the links between Socialism and Fascism are tenuous other than the Fascist party we all know best, were the Nazi's which comes from "National Socialist". If you define the term "Socialist" in the strict left wing sense, then Fascism doesn't fit. If you define it as a huge government intervening in the economy and lives of its citizens, and allow it to have left and right wing forms, then Fascism is the right wing form of Socialism.
I think part of the problem here is the U.S. political and economic system is so completely confused at this point I'm not sure you can cubbyhole it in to any of the traditional definitions. It defies definition. Components of the system seem to be rampant free market capitalism bordering on Libertarianism. But the government intervenes so frequently in those markets you can only refer to it as state capitalism, certainly all the recent bailout and interventions are exactly that, so were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by design. Other components, many dating to FDR, are blatant left wing Socialism, Social Security, Medicare, unions. But this country's massive expenditures on its military and intelligence apparatus, launching aggressive wars based on fabrication(Iraq), pronounced nationalist tendencies, support for right wing dictators the world over, unrestrained warrantless spying, torture, shredding the Constitution and the ignoring basic due process(rendition, arresting and detaining people without charge and denying them access to lawyers, courts or fair trials) are all the hallmarks of a Fascist state, as are the disturbing ties between government and corporations. From Wikipedia:
"Fascism, pronounced, is a political ideology that seeks to combine radical and authoritarian nationalism with a corporatist economic system, and which is usually considered to be on the far right of the traditional left-right political spectrum."
I think Fascism is still probably the closest term we have for the current governments of the U.S., Russia, China and the U.K. Socialist democracy probably applies best to most of the rest of the E.U. since they are mostly harmless nanny states. Don't think there are many actual representative democracies left, or if their are they are tiny(I don't know India well enough to know where it sits).
"And, please stop calling every fiscal policy you don't like a "Ponzi scheme."
I wasn't referring to fiscal policy, I was referring to the housing bubble. It WAS a ponzi scheme, the only other useful term would be pyramid scheme. The people originating all those half million dollars mortgages to hairdressers and gardeners knew they would eventually implode, so did all the mortgage auditors and the bond rating agencies, so did most of the Wall Street banksters who securitized them and sold them off to pension funds and assorted other investors as AAA bonds. There is absolutely NO WAY subprime mortgages to people with either no proof of income, or insufficient income, could ever warrant AAA bond ratings.
All the way through the system people were just cashing in on the front end of the pyramid scheme and were indifferent that a crash was inevitable when all the ARM interest rates ballooned and those gardeners and hairdressers would inevitably default. The whole system was designed to allow people to grab money where none existed, and to screw people at the end of the scheme(mainly bond investors who thought they had bought ultra safe AAA bonds).
The original Internet bubble was just as much a pyramid scheme(there I didn't call it a Ponsi scheme). In case you haven't noticed the U.S. economy is so dysfunctional now the only way it keeps going is through one pyramid scheme after another, borrowing money from the rest of the world, or just printing it. That will probably continue until the rest of the world gets a clue and removes the U.S. dollar as the sole global reserve currency. Charles DeGaulle in the 1960's railed that allowing the U.S. dollar to be the global reserve currency allowed the U.S. to print money, borrow money and generally steal the rest of the world blind. Once the world switches to a different reserve currency, and the world has finally figured out the scam the U.S. was running the last two years, the U.S. wont be able to borrow a plugged nickel, the dollar will implode and the party will be over. Every other country that can't pay its bills ends in the arms of the IMF because they can't just borrow and print like the U.S.. Well not every country, Zimbabwe also tried to print its way out of its economic problems....
"The bulk of the spending increases have been in defense, an area where traditional socialists oppose massive spending and where libertarians support it."
I think you missed the point. I'm not saying our government is "Socialist" in the left leaning, pro worker nanny state form. I'm saying the U.S. is Socialist in the right wing, state capitalism sense(a.k.a. Fascism). I know using that word causes immediate invocation of Godwin, and half the readers thinks its wacko the instant they see the word, but it really is the only term that really applies to the U.S. political/economic system now. It can easily be applied to Russia, China and the U.K. too.
Massive military spending it a hallmark of Fascism, it defines it, it is a mandatory part. The fact that the U.S. has, and spends so much on, such a massive, aggressive military, engaging in aggressive wars (and the invasion of Iraq was classic unprovoked aggression based on fabrication) just helps prove my case. Even better the U.S. also has a gigantic web of intelligence agencies who are increasingly spending more time spying in America than anywhere else furthers my argument. The infamous East German police state had to have an army of people to eavesdrop on a small fraction of its people. Thanks to computers and telecommunications the U.S. can now spy on nearly everyone all the time.
The big problem here is that chances are the NSA is directly tapping all the backbone fiber in the Internet already, and they are building giant new data centers in Utah and Texas to store Yettabytes of data which is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Chances are the NSA is already and will certainly be in the future recording every email, IM, URL GET and POST and phone call flowing through every fiber they manage to tap and they will probably tap them all in this country, in all their allied countries like the UK and Australia, all the ones crossing the oceans, and of course have listened to all the RF bouncing around the planet for decades. They started tapping Soviet undersea copper cables decades ago using submarines so if somehow a telecomm wont let them tap their cables they will probably just do it anyway.
As nearly as I can tell Joe Nacchio, the CEO of Qwest, is the only exec that said no when the Bush administration told the telecoms to let the NSA taps their backbones. They responded with a dubious insider stock trading case against him and threw him in Federal prison to show what happens to people who don't "cooperate". The beauty of American law is just about everyone has cheated on their taxes, traded on an insider stock tip, used illegal drugs, or done something else the government can use against you to force compliance and obedience.
Once they have total surveillance I kind of doubt the government will even need to go to an ISP or a warrant to get access to your inbox. Its really messy for them to have to go to an ISP because telling the sysadmin who the target is risks compromising the "investigation". It is much cleaner and simpler for them to just record EVERYTHING at the backbone so they can data mine it at will, and can hop in the way back machine to see in detail what someone did years ago without relying on an ISP to retain anything.
The NSA is building huge new data centers in Utah and Texas. If TechCrunch is to be believed they will store a "yottabyte" which is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB of data from communication intercepts. You kind of figure that only thing that would require this much storage is they are probably going to record pretty much everything going through every fiber optic cable they can tap, plus all the radio communications they can eavesdrop on with satellites. That would probably be all phone calls, all email, all IM, probably every URL ever computer is accessing.
This will be extremely convenient since:
A) you can data mine it and find all kinds of interesting things, terrorist threats, political dissidents, politicians doing illegal or immoral things which you can use to blackmail them later to make them vote the way you want them to vote. This may have already been done to Jane Harmon who was caught in a warrentless wire tap doing something illegal, influence peddling, with Israeli lobbyists. This might have been used by the Bush administration to force her to back some of their activities since she is on the House Intelligence committee which oversees.... communications surveillance (at least is supposed to if the White House bothers to tell them what they are doing which they didn't when they started this NSA program originally).
B) even if a person isn't of interest now, if they become of interest later, you can hop in the way back machine and see everything they've said and done
It would obviously be problematic for the NSA to do this if there were any warrants required at all. Needless to say the Obama administration is just continuing pervasive spying on everyone and everything started under Bush and this court case, were it to succeed, would be inconvenient since it would almost certainly establish this program is unconstitutional and therefor illegal. Obama is just another in a long line of politicians dedicated to constantly expanding their power and the power of the Federal government. At this point the Federal government is an out of control snow ball rolling going down hill turning in to an avalanche.
I think you are the thick one here. He was implying that the current Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, are already socialist in practice if not in name. and he has a pretty viable argument.
Here is a chart from Wikipedia of the size of the Federal budget for the last 14 years:
* 2010 United States federal budget - $3.60 trillion (submitted 2009 by President Obama)
* 2009 United States federal budget - $3.10 trillion (submitted 2008 by President Bush)
* 2008 United States federal budget - $2.90 trillion (submitted 2007 by President Bush)
* 2007 United States federal budget - $2.77 trillion (submitted 2006 by President Bush)
* 2006 United States federal budget - $2.7 trillion (submitted 2005 by President Bush)
* 2005 United States federal budget - $2.4 trillion (submitted 2004 by President Bush)
* 2004 United States federal budget - $2.3 trillion (submitted 2003 by President Bush)
* 2003 United States federal budget - $2.2 trillion (submitted 2002 by President Bush)
* 2002 United States federal budget - $2.0 trillion (submitted 2001 by President Bush)
* 2001 United States federal budget - $1.9 trillion (submitted 2000 by President Clinton)
* 2000 United States federal budget - $1.8 trillion (submitted 1999 by President Clinton)
* 1999 United States federal budget - $1.7 trillion (submitted 1998 by President Clinton)
* 1998 United States federal budget - $1.7 trillion (submitted 1997 by President Clinton)
* 1997 United States federal budget - $1.6 trillion (submitted 1996 by President Clinton)
* 1996 United States federal budget - $1.6 trillion (submitted 1995 by President Clinton)
Its more than doubled in 14 years and its been done by both Democrats and Republicans. Bush, supposedly the small government Conservative nearly doubled it all by himself in eight years. He not only doubled spending but cut taxes to create staggering deficits. They would have been really staggering earlier if it hadn't been for the housing bubble generating fantasy tax revenue. We don't have that bubble any more which is why deficits are going to be running more than a trillion until we gin up a new bubble(Ponzi scheme).
The U.S. GDP is maybe 14 trillion so the Federal budget alone is more than 20% of the economy. If you count secondary effects from all that spending it could easily be half our GDP now.
The budget deficits are now projected to run over a trillion a year indefinitely which is nearly as much as the ENTIRE federal budget in 1996. Of course the Fed and Treasury have also destroyed the dollar in the same period so a dollar in 1996 was worth a lot more than it is now which is why Gold is now over $1000. Gold has actually out performed the stock market the last couple decades thanks to the last couple years of economic devastation.
And of course in the last two years under both Democrats and Republicans there has been MASSIVE intervention in the economy to bail out Wall Street and Detroit. In so doing they have created massive moral hazard, by allowing giant corporations to do truly awful, incompetent, sometimes criminal things in the mortgage and auto market and just have the government step in to clean up their mess at the expense of ordinary Americans. Banksters pocketed billions and billions of dollars in the process and with collusion of their shills in government like Paulson have completely shredded free market capitalism in this country. They then turned around and have completely gutted all recent attempts to regulate them to keep them from doing it again... and they will do it again.... probably alread
Another interesting article today about Goldman Sach's role in the subprime mortgage fiasco. A former Goldman exec has a tell all book out coming out "The 88 Biggest Lies on Wall Street". You have to take him with a grain of salt because he is probably a scumbag and has just turned to profiteering through his tell all book but I like this money quote:
"It's not just unethical," Talbott said of the chain of profiting subprime players extending from real estate appraisers to Wall Street. "It's totally criminal."
It is entertaining to see one of Goldman's own turn on them, it doesn't happen often.
From mortgage brokers, to appraisers, rating agencies and the big Wall Street banks that securitized all that sub prime garbage as AAA rated bonds, chances are EVERY one involved knew exactly what they were doing, that it was criminal, and it would eventually collapse. They were just pocketing as much money as they could as quickly as they could so they could cash out before the house of cards fell. It was massive organized crime and it was basically the largest Ponzi scheme in histroy, much bigger than Madoff and noone seems to be going to jail for it. Maybe EVERY is a little harsh, it appears some people at Merril Lynch, Citigroup and AIG had absolutely no idea the hole they were digging for themselves and their company though chances are they all still cashed out rich before their companies imploded. I wager Goldman knew exactly what they were doing, and in particular had billions in hedges through AIG to cover them if those bonds went to crap. Unfortunately AIG had hundreds of billions of those derivative contracts and absolutely no capital to cover them so if the government hadn't bailed out AIG, and funneled billions to Goldman Sachs through AIG with no strings attached Goldman would have ended in bankruptcy. Fortunately for Goldman a former Goldman CEO was treasury secretary when the shit hit the fan so he could steer billions to Goldman at tax payer expense to keep them afloat.
That seems like a reasonable attitude towards a game, especially if its not a competitive game, its a just a time wasting affirmation of Skinner's theories on reinforcement and yes you are operating at about the same level as a pigeon.
Me personally I simply will never play a competitive game like Evony where some players gain competitive advantage either by pouring cash in to the game, or falling for scams. If a competitive game developer doesn't make a reasonable effort to maintain a level playing field they are an epic fail and aren't worth playing. Eve and WoW are almost as bad because once a clan, guild or even individual player becomes big, wealthy and entrenched that unlevels the playing field.
Its ridiculously hard to carpet bomb a widely dispersed agrarian country and accomplish anything. Especially one they start digging in and have the cover of mountains and jungles. Afghanistan has mountains, lots of mountains. We dropped more tonnage on the tiny country of Vietnam than we dropped during all of World War II and it accomplished next to nothing. Bombing only works on highly urban, highly industrialized countries with lots of easy high value targets like Germany and Japan. It worked reasonably well in Iraq during the invasion because its a country concentrated in a couple narrow river valleys and had lots of targets(bridges, command and control centers, an actual army). Afghanistan has none of that.
One of the more basic reasons "governing wont work" is that politicians and regulators are easily captured by special interests who have the money, the time, the connections and the motivation to manipulate the government. A few million well placed lobbying dollars and campaign contributions can yield multi-billion dollar windfalls at the expense of the American people.
You kind of have to wonder why the conservative Republicans complain so much about big government because for at least the last 10 years, and really a lot longer than that, they have been the most adept at exploiting it for their own gain. Only reason they are complaining about lately is they aren't in power as of 2006/2008. The potency of their vitriol against big government only spikes when they aren't in power. When they are in power they tend to be more OK with it, and their complaining about is empty rhetoric which acts as cover while they are looting it.
I often shudder to think what this country would be like if the Libertarians won and everything was completely deregulated. Chances are the foxes would devour all the chickens. But, when you see how our government actually works, especially lately, the Libertarians actually have a point. Much of the pillaging and devastation is being aided, abetted or actually initiated by politicians and regulators who have been captured by special interest, so they give legal cover to the pillaging, and trillions of dollars are transferred from unlucky powerless groups to lucky powerful ones. For example, senior citizens are completely looting younger working people to get 20, 30 and 40 years of Medicare and Social Security though they actually paid very little in to the system. Oayroll taxes were jacked up from nothing to 12.5% in the early 80s so most seniors didn't pay anything in but are taking huge sums out.
It is quite possible things might actually work better under real Libertarianism where Wall Street bankers get absolutely no assistance from the Fed, Treasury, Congress or the President. They get no tax shelters, no government backed loan programs and most importantly NO bailouts when they screw up and should fail. The absolute worst thing done in the last couple years was the complete destruction of moral hazard which is the most crucial foundation of Capitalism. If you know that if you fail the government will bail you out you don't have free market capitalism any more, you have state capitalism(i.e. Fascism) which is what I think we have now.
Chances are a few banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs would still end up running the world under Libertarianism but I have reached a point that I would like to see the government get the hell out of it and let them sink or swim on their own. It couldn't be any worst than what we have now.
Unfortunately I've come to the conclusion there is NO political/economic philosophy that actually works in practice. Every one devolves in to some small group acquiring all the wealth and power and screwing it out of everyone else. In some systems its party members and bureaucrats, in others it politicians, and in others its bankers and CEO's. As Shakespeare thoroughly outlines a long time ago, we are a species with vicious tendencies that spiral completely out of control in the people who aspire to power and wealth and there seems to be no way to stop those people.
I think she was talking about the Wall Street bankers and stock brokers who disproportionately come from wealthy families, go to prep schools, get degrees from ivy league schools and then go work at Goldman Sachs, Citi and JP Morgan. They also end being treasury secretaries, on the Federal Reserve and New York Fed (which is the body that actually runs Wall Street though its more like Wall Street runs it) and the President's economic advisors.
If you remember the resignation letter of Andrew Lahde after making a killing of the ivy leaguers and quitting rich:
"The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America."
The U.S. Senate also tends to be a rich kids club and is also the place that tends to do the most looking out for the rich, since one senator can often block legislation in the public interest to the benefit of special interest. John McCain for instance wasn't really rich enough so once he got out of Vietnam he dumped the wife that had stood by him while he was a POW and married a more attractive women who happened to be an heir to a sizable fortune of an Arizona beer distributor, and who were politically connected enough in Arizon to get him elected to the Senate.
And of course the Bush clan are the epitome of the stereotype though they've only been a part of America's new aristocracy for about a century.
One reason Carter, Clinton and Obama were so skewered in the White House is the rich WASP/Jewish aristocracy considers them to be poor trash and not worthy of running their piggy bank. Clinton and Obama in particular had stellar educations but were born to poverty so aren't acceptable by "the establishment".
"Now, we worry far too much about civilian deaths, which just makes it impossible to win a war."
When the Soviet Union was at war in Afghanistan they killed civilians with ruthless abandon. It was a complete disaster. You do it in a guerrilla war/insurgency it just unites the population against you, it drives recruitment for the insurgency, it encourages civilians to hide the insurgency, and when your army is living in the middle of those pissed off civilians it is extremely vulnerable.
Germany and Japan were modern, industrialized, urban societies. Bombing them in to the stone age was doable. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan they found next to nothing worth bombing because Afghanistan was still in the stone age, and certainly was after the Soviets had already bombed them in to the stone age. The insurgents mostly scattered and many escaped in to Pakistan. Trying to carpet bomb a mostly rural country to kill all its civilians would be nearly impossible even if it were a good idea which it isn't.
The fatal flaw in Afghanistan was that the U.S. let Pakistan's tribal areas operate as safe heavens just like they had when the insurgency crucified the Soviet army there. Since the U.S. supplied the insurgency against the Soviets through the Pakistan tribal areas you would think the U.S. would have known what would happen by letting them use them the same way again. It appears between drone strikes and the recent Pakistan offensive into the triable regions they just now might be trying to deny them their safe haven. It remains to be seen if it works. Unfortunately Pakistan's ISI and much of its military are openly allied with the Taliban and have been for decades. The may also be clandestinely allied with Al Qaeda so relying on them to do anything against them is naive at best. They just put on shows so they can get billions more in free money from the U.S.
The other fatal flaw in Afghanistan is you aren't really fighting the Taliban or Al Qaeda, you are fighting about 2000 very local, tribal militias that hate occupiers, have been fighting occupiers since the dawn of time, and they are EXTREMELY good at destroying occupying armies with superior weapons, they've been doing it for thousands of years.
AMaya is the only one I've used. Doubt it would be fast enough for note taking though it outputs MathML so you can drop it straight in to HTML and a browser. It is open source so you can optimize it if you desire.
"As far as the reasons, they claim it was due to grave warnings by the administration about damage to national security. "
Of course that rationale is used to conceal every illegal thing every government does and has been since the dawn of time. If, as a newspaper and beacon of truth and freedom, you have knowledge of government activity that is obviously illegal, prone to massive abusive and is violating basic civil liberties and the Constitution and you let the people perpetrating the crime stop you with that canard you are pretty much useless as a public watch dog. The FISA court is already a rubber stamp for the administration in power, there is no reason for the executive branch to be allowed to completely bypass it other than they pretty much wanted to spy on anyone anytime without restraint.
"It also does not follow that just because a whistleblower came to them that no investigation was involved. I thought there was quite a lot of investigation to corroborate the claims, which would require a significant network of trusted sources within the government."
I wouldn't count on it. That program had the highest classification there was. They weren't even briefing the congressmen responsible for oversight of intelligence activities which was probably illegal in and of itself. Of course if they had briefed the Congressional intelligence authorities it would have leaked immediately. The chances the NY times could have found anyone else in the know who would have corroborated it were slim. Corroboration by anyone other than the White House would have been grounds for yanking security clearance and throwing the person in jail. So the only option they had was take it directly to the Executive branch and ask them to deny or corroborate. Presumably the Bush administration threatened them so they did nothing for a long, long time until the Bush administration was starting to crater after Katrina.
"So your argument is what? Better never than late? Was anyone else even close to revealing it?"
In the case of warrantless wire tapping all indications are the NY Times had the story in 2004 prior to the election and Bill Keller sat on it until December 2005. Would it have made a differences in the 2004 election, probably not, but you never know. I sure wish it had because it would have saved us another four years of abuse, Constitution shredding and incompetence. It was certainly something the American people had a right to know before they reelected the Bush administration and for whatever reason the Times sat on it until a time when revealing it had little effect. I wager they were afraid of and intimated by the Bush administration in 2004 when Bush was riding high in power and popularity, so they waited until after Katrina and Bush popularity had already started to plummet. If so it was pretty spineless.
It also wasn't really NY Times reporting that uncovered it. It was apparently due to whistleblower at the Justice Department, Thomas Tamm. It took some serious guts on his part to risk his career and prison to expose it to the Times and they did nothing with the information for nearly two years.
This is simply not a case for why newspaper journalism shined. It makes a case for why we need whistleblower protection and a reliable avenue for whistleblowers to expose illegal activity in the halls of power. It tends to suggest the NY Times wasn't a very reliable avenue for this.
I'd have to research the other stories to comment, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were also exposed by whistleblowers in the Bush administration fed up with their law breaking more than New York Times reporting. The one really good thing about big newspapers like the Times is they do have lawyers and the ability to fight the government in court to protect whistleblower's identities.
"The Federal Reserve does not print money."
Read up on quantitative easing. It is what the Fed's been doing massively since the crisis. It is printing money though its done electronically. From Wikipedia:
"Quantitative easing is another way to influence monetary policy, only recently begun to be used in the United States. Other countries, such as Japan, have provided a template for some Fed actions. Essentially, quantitative easing provides a method for the central bank to provide funds at lower than zero interest rates, in order to increase the monetary supply and combat deflationary forces. This is accomplished by the Fed purchasing U.S. government debt with newly printed U.S. currency. In essence, the Fed is monetizing the debt. In the current (late 2007 to today) macro-economic environment, the slowing velocity of money has induced U.S. central bankers to pursue a variety of new, and to some radical, policies to produce economic stimulus."
They also allowed Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to acquire bank charters so they have access to this free money to fuel their commodity, stocks and bond gambling. It is helping to fuel the current bubble in stocks, bonds and commodities.
It is inappropriate for investment banks to have access to the discount window. Paul Volcker has been lobbying hard to get the Obama to stop it, but Geitner and Summers being stooges of Wall Street are ignoring him. Discount window access should only be allowed to conservative commercial banks who don't gamble on the stock market. Ever since the repeal of Glass Steagel and they let Citigroup access it, and certainly since they let Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and what's left of Merrill access it they've created massive potential for abuse and for bubble creation.
Go to Wharton or get an MBA from Harvard, Yale or a lesser Ivy League university. WASP or Jewish is probably best. Get in the right fraternity/sorority. Probably helps to be attractive so plastic surgery as required. Skills in Golf and Tennis are mandatory. If you have morals or ethics you need not apply. You need to be willing to lie, cheat, steal or screw your mother for a beloved buck. Watch Oliver Stone's Wall Street, it has apparently turned in to a recruiting tool and career guide to a life of crime on Wall Street, though Stone intended the opposite when he made it.
When you graduate they will probably be waiting to recruit you. Once they hire you, you need to be extremely adept at knowing which asses to kiss and which ones to screw.
Well there was the ties to Al Qaeda thing, also been proved False.
There was the "to get Iraq's oil thing", well if that was it we completely botched that since I think the Chinese have more Iraq oil contracts than the U.S. now. It would take a LOT of oil to pay back the trillion dollars we've squandered there.
There was the "excuse to give huge no bid contracts" to all our Republican connected friends. Check. That one is a winner.
There was the "to bring Democracy to the Middle East". That's iffy at best. We mostly created a Shia dominated, Iran friendly, theocracy with a whiff of disfunctional Democracy. Once we pull our troops out it could crater in to a civil war in a week.
There was the "to kill Saddam" because he tried to kill my dad(George W's dad). That might be a winner.
There was the "my daddy botched the first Gulf War and I have daddy issues" so I had to do it again and prove I'm better than my daddy at the price of $1 trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed.
I could go on... maybe you should tell me the reason for it... I really can't think of any that actually make sense, Mister Anonymous Cowtard?
You should probably consider a nice career in banking and move to Wall Street then. Its not exactly a secret that the big Wall Street banks have pretty much devoured the U.S. economy and they run the government, insuring that their success will be guaranteed by the Congress, the President and his Wall Street friendly administration(same for Dems and Republicans), the Fed (by printing money and giving it to them at zero percent even if it destroys the dollar) and in times of the trouble the U.S. taxpayer. They are a huge percentage of the U.S. economy now and their compensation dwarves pretty much every other career.
I was reading earlier this week the U.S. now has the greatest income inequality in the world except for Singapore and Hong Kong which are tiny city states. Last time we had income inequality at this level was in the 1920's right before the Great Depression. Lord Brian Griffiths of Fforestfach, vice chairman at Goldman Sachs Intl., a life peer under England's nobility scheme, and Christian theorist of "biblically based wealth creation." recently said: "We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all." The dirty little secret is Goldman Sach's keeps all the prosperity and opportunity for themselves and their rich friends, and the rest of us will never see it unless we manage to join their exclusive little club. We've pretty much returned to aristocracy and are certainly in a plutocracy with a tinge of kleptocracy since when Wall Street screwed up they smoothed it over by outright legalized theft from the rest of us.
The article doesn't spell it out but all of America's best and brightest are going to Wall Street and big business, not science. Unless they are idealists or altruists they go there because that's where the easy money is. Its mostly money being produced via elaborate legalized Ponzi schemes but that doesn't change the fact if you make it on Wall Steet you get money for nothing and chicks for free. Whose going to enter the exciting world of Physics when they can have that, at least while the party lasts, and it appears after a brief glitch its back bigger and better than ever.
"What the US needs to get back into the space race is a good old fashioned nose tweaking."
It doesn't seem to be working on the good ole economy front. China is running massive trade surpluses with the U.S., are taking all our jobs, and are seizing control of many of the world's raw materials. If there were any competitive fire left in America's belly it should have surfaced already. You can't really do another Apollo or compete in another space race when you are running trillion dollar trade and budget deficits, and mired in several pointless wars that are consuming what resources aren't going to health care and social security. During the 60's the US was still flush with economic success in the wake of World War II when the rest of the world had been flattened.
The U.S. is starting to more closely resemble an early version of Great Britain, which having lost its empire in World War II and the pounds status as global reserve currency is now mired in debt and can't even support its vastly diminished military or pay its civil servants.
The Washington Post is a pale shadow of the paper that broke Watergate. Personally I stopped reading it about the time they fired Dan Froomkin and their execs thought it was cool to sponsor pay-for-access cocktail parties with politicians. Their online site was showing promise until Katharine Weymouth canned the people making it happen and forced consolidation with their print division which was like mixing oil and water. Last month they issued guidelines forbidding their reporters from using Twitter and other social media which shows their dinosaurish nature. Dan Froomkin is now in charge of the Political section of... the Huffington Post. Jim Brady another Washington Post luminary is starting a new online Washington news site for Politico.
If you want to hop in the way back machine to just before the Iraq invasion, Judith Miller, used the New York Time to shill for her books on WMD's and for the Bush administration to whip up the frenzy about non existent WMD's in Iraq. This has since cost the U.S. about a trillion dollars and thousands of dead and tens of thousands wounded for a lie, which a dead tree journalist helped propagate. Of course the Hearst empire pioneered yellow journalism and shilling to start wars for no reason in 1898, "Remember the Maine", so its not a new phenomena. And of course in 2003 the NY Times also had Jayson Blair who made a career on plagiarized and fabricated stories and it took forever for the Times editors to notice.
So to balance that one Watergate success story everyone cites in these debates there have been multiple recent failures. The U.S. press was pretty much asleep at the wheel during Iraq, Patriot Act abuses, torture, warrantless spying on Americans on a massive scale, etc. The NY Times did break the warrantless wiretap story but only after it had been running for years.
You seem to be waxing nostalgic for old school journalism that doesn't really exist anymore if it ever did. I'd being willing to bet if Woodward and Bernstein were to try to break Watergate today, Nixon would call up the Washington Posts management/editors and it would be killed before it saw the light of day because the management of most papers today are pro establishment and pro corporate interests instead of a beacon of truth and freedom. All the Presiden't men was a product of a handful of unique people who did something amazing and right, it had nothing to do with the actual merits of dead tree journalism.
I too would wax poetic for old school journalism but to think its still even alive or it will flourish in the brain dead environment that is most dead tree newspapers today is optimistic at best. I have to hope the web actually does succeed in producing a beacon for truth and freedom and that it rises above the sea of noise that is the web. Its a long shot but its a lot more likely than hoping for dead tree newspapers or TV networks to be honest stewards of the truth.
I gather AOL is hiring reporters at a furious rate and the plan of the new CEO who came from Google is to make it in to the leader in online Journalism. I wish him well, though my brain has seizures whenever I see the brand he is working under.
Uh, you should have looked at a map. The Shuttle SRB's splash down 160 miles down range, that isn't anywhere close to Miami or St Louis, its in the gulf unless you are launching on a polar trajectory. I doubt Ares or Apollo first stage would be much different. Worse thing about the Gulf, and its a more recent hazard are all the offshore oil platforms.
Russia has launched entirely over land for their entire history though the population in that area is somewhat sparser.
If you add up all launch delays and scrubs it must have cost NASA years in delays and billions of dollars so I doubt Florida really was a great choice hind sight being 20/20.
On top of that they play Russian roulette with every launch with lightning strikes which is a seriously bad thing for vehicles full of explosives and sensitive mission critical electronics, so Florida where severe thunderstorms are a daily occurrence was a dubious choice.
Would also have been a pretty good idea to partner with Mexico and put the launch site further south kind of like Europe did.
The Southern tip of Texas is substantially closer to the Equator than Kennedy is and it would launch over the Gulf for the early part of the flight which is the really dangerous part. Brownsville does get some rain but it not nearly as bad as Kennedy. It will never happen at this point but it would have been a lot better choice than Florida.
There all kinds of good things NASA does especially in it lesser known fringes. JPL is a never ending source of good things. I saw earlier this week one of NASA's best aerodynamicists passed away this week at 88. He slept on a cot in his office at Langley and lived to make things better. He designed the wasp waist on supersonic aircraft making them practical, the supercritical wing and the winglets on the ends of commercial aircraft which dramatically increased speeds and reduced fuel consumption for just about every plane flying.
I'm sure there are probably still good people in NASA's manned space program but the problem is its turned in to a giant self perpetuating bureaucracy and its flaws now far outweigh its benefits. This is a nearly inevitable end for every big bureaucracy not just NASA's.
"You know, or the sun explodes"
Which is of course billions of years in the future so your argument is pointless in any context that matters. Overpopulation and its many manifestations which include climate change is a here and now problem and it most definitely does post an immediate existential threat to us as a species and all the other species on the planet. You do know we are exterminating species at a furious rate partially just through massive habitat destruction? Even if you fix CO2 emmissions, if you don't stop population growth our species is still going to crash, and take most of the other species with it, when it runs out of water, food and space, unless there are some huge advances in technology. I am confident bacteria, cockroaches, rats and weeds will survive to start evolution over.
"That's why my proposed solution is to just nuke the entire planet from orbit."
A probably more effective approach would be to prevent Catholicism, Islam and assorted other religions from continuing to promote uncontrolled breeding, and make birth control widely available across the globe. If you stabilize Earth's population or better start it on a gentle downward slope our prospects for long term survival would dramatically improve. Our predominant economic system also works against us, since Capitalism and Capitalism induced greed demand constant growth. It isn't a sustainable economic model on a planet with limited resources. You either have to expand in to space, or you have to adopt an economic model which is sustainable.
"able to kill off all of life"
We have however had numerous extinction events which have wiped out most life. Its also taken hundreds of millions of years for plants to sequester CO2 to its pre-industrialization level. On its current course Man will release it all back in to the atmosphere in less than a thousand years unless we make a major course change. I don't even pretend to know what the actual consequences of that will be, but it is almost certain to result in a dramatic change in our planet. Its almost certain to be a problem that half our population lives at basically the current sea level and we need more habitable space, not less if we continue unrestrained population growth.
"History 101: Mankind's early ventures across the ocean were in search of unclaimed mineral wealth (read: GOLD)."
Not really sure of your point other than yes some explorers were obviously motivated by greed. They did for the most part manage to loot, plunder and infect every culture they encountered and pretty much wiped out every one. The explorers that lasted were not quite so bad. The colonies that stuck on North America were usually people fleeing religious persecution and political oppression in Europe. There have been a host of explorers who did it for adventure, knowledge and more benevolent motives.
"Spelunkers would beg to differ."
You are certainly welcome to live in caves, I'll pass....
"Well, I seem to recall that a recent U.S. president had tried to commit us to colonizing Mars within a few decades"
So did his dad a decade earlier. All they did was proclaim a goal which they knew NASA wouldn't achieve especially with the finite resources allocated and NASA's ability to squander time and money. These are always on a time line so they wont be done until long after they long gone. Call me a cynic but I'm pretty sure most initiatives out of the White House are just a way to buy votes in Florida and Texas, Florid being particularly important. Presidents also need to keep the Congressional delegations of places like Florida, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Maryland, Virginia, Colorado and California. The space program is now mostly just another avenue to distribute pork and create jobs, one of many. Its what happens anytime you build a huge bureaucracy and then let it entrench, bloat and rot. The CIA, DOD, Treasury, DOE, etc. are just as bad. The Dept. of Homeland Security was that way from inception.