Obviously you DIDN'T READ MY POST. Because I SAID hardcore journalists ARE very left leaning. They are also intelligent and well educated and liberalism is well correlated to advanced education and intellect. The key point is the big corprate entities they work for aren't left leaning, many of the editors they work for aren't left leaning, and many of the talking head celebrities that dominate talk TV and talk radio now are VERY right leaning. There is a lot more to the modern media mix than grunt "journalist". You are conveniently choosing ignore that fact and to focus on the only one part of the mix that is liberal and ignore all the powerful parts that aren't.
Its also a fact that many journalists today, especially talking head TV types are going to abandon their personal beliefs in favor of whatever view point drives their ratings the best so most are blowing with the wind, Anderson Cooper being a sterling example. They will also generally do and say whatever their editors and bosses tell them to, since most of them will sacrifice their ethical position personal beliefs to stay employed and to get ahead in a very competitive business.
" You're also ignoring that the leftist point of view permeates most broadcast TV quite thoroughly (Yes, except for Fox)."
Wow is that a log right wingers will never stop sawing. A case in point is CNN. Yes it used to be a very left leaning news network and being the first 24 hour network, and a every popular one early on, it did infuriate the right. It was run by Ted Turner then and it reflected his very left leaning bias. THAT WAS A LONG TIME AGO. If you've actually watched CNN lately you might discover it lurched very far to the center if not the right. Its not owned by Ted Turner any more, its owned by a coprate behemoth. It spends a LOT more time covering religion and business than it ever used to. Headline News now has Nancy Grace and Glen Beck in primtime and they are most certainly not left leaning. Lou Dobbs certainly isn't left wing, neither is Anderson Cooper. Not sure what Cooper's bias is, other than rampant self promotion. Christian Amanpour is certainly left leaning as is CNN international but they are catering to an audience outside the U.S. that wont watch right wing American flag waving and lunatic fringe...like Fox.
Two things changed CNN and you just didn't notice:
- Their management changed from Ted Turner to Times Warner - They've been fighting a losing ratings battle with Fox and they've become a lot more like Fox in a misguided attempt to compete
Two things happened in general that pushed MOST news organization to the right:
- 9/11 and rampant patriotism baiting and flag waving that followed. - Republicans came to completely dominate the government and most news organization were VERY reluctant to challenge them when they were riding high in power and polls.
If the news media was inherently and completely left leaning some of them would have challenged the rational for the Iraq war before it happened. They almost universally cheered it on, and had embeds riding in HumVees glorifying it, which is not something an inherently left biased media would have done.
Only in the last year or so have news organization started to drift back to the left. Why? Because the Republicans and the right wing stopped being popular and are now increasingly out of power. People started to realize they were actually horrible leaders so news organizations are a lot more willing to attack the right than they were a couplee years ago.
Unfortunately news organizations live and die by ratings and advertising. When the country swung to the right so did a lot of news organizations, now that the country is moving center, left so are a lot of news organizations.
Bottomline why don't you right wingers stop pushing this nonsense the media is massively left biased. It simply isn't true any more. Talk radio for example is massively right biased. The New York Times, pilloried for its left wing bias, was also the leader perpetrator, thanks to Judith Miller, of the myth that Iraq was developing WMD's and was the leading media outlet, along with Fox, that suckered the American people in to going in to Iraq.
The one inherent left bias is that many real journalists are well educated, smart and left leaning. But this is more than countered by celebrity talking heads like O'Reilly and Limbaugh who are unabashedly right wing, and also by the fact that most of those liberal journalists are working for right leaning corporations and editors. For Washington Post liberalism there is Wall Street Journal conservatism.
It is easy in concept, difficult in practice. Boards need to be appointed which have more of an adversarial role towards their executives and who strive to compensate all employees in a company based on their performance and contribution to success. Shareholders in particular need to be more proactive in the companies in which they are stake holders to hold their boards and executives to a standard that if you don't perform they don't get rewarded and if they succeed they get rewarded handsomely. The fatal flaw in the current system is bad performers get rewarded just as well, sometimes better, than good performers.
Unfortunately today investing in stock is a lot more like placing a bet on a roulette table than investing in a business. No one actually cares what happens in the stocks they own, they just want it to go up so they can cash their chips. An incompetent exec who pumps the stock is better than one who builds a sound business but doesn't pump the stock, as long as you get out before it crashes. Most boards and execs today are also not really focused on building successful companies which will last, they are trying to make their killing, get their FU money, get their yacht and at that point they are above the system and the rest of us. Greed has always been there, there have always been bad execs and bad investments, today it is just becoming more pervasive.
Obviously you didn't or you have real reading comprehension problem because you just did the same thing in this post you did in your second post. You just inserted a bunch of words in to my mouth I didn't say even if you are granted huge license to paraphrase. I think the fatal flaw in your posts is your willingness to paraphrase and create a reality distortion field in the process. Try sticking to direct quotes of what I say and not making shit up, pretending I said it, and rebutting something you said, not me.
Let me try to restart my original argument since you didn't get it and probably wont get it this time either.
Executives who perform well and lead their companies to success, deserve to be well compensated. Executives who risk their personal wealth and very hard work to build their company from scratch and succeed deserve huge compensation, Sam Walton for example. Executives like those at Exxon recently who were lucky beneficiaries of skyrocketing oil prices are in a gray area. A complete idiot could succeed running an oil company when prices are spiking so their is a question as to whether the ex CEO of Exxon deserved to get filthy rich for being in the right place at the right time.
But, there has been in recent years a dizzying array of apparently incompetent executives who have become fabulously wealthy either because:
A. The board of directors granted them compensation far beyond their real value, performance or the success of their companies on their watch, the ex CEO of Home Depot being just the most recent of many. This is a direct result of boards which have been corrupted and are failing at their most basic role of oversight.
B. They engaged in fraudulent and unsound business practices to inflate the price of their stock so they could make a killing and get out before the house of cards collapsed, WorldCom and Enron just being the poster children but there have been way to many especially during the bubble.
Their has been a fundamental flaw developing in executive compensation starting in the 80's in places like junk bonds and corrupt Savings and Loans. It widened in to a giant crack during the dotcom bubble as a bunch of geeks got fabulously wealthy on fantasy business plans posing as real companies. Now it appears every executive who makes it to the top of a publicly traded company thinks it is their god given right to get millions to hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation even if their performance is somewhere between mediocre and disastrous. I blame the dot com bubble in particular because it set the expectation that everyone who makes it to VP or above in a big publicly traded company must get rich whether they deserve it or not.
Its a simple fact that average Americans are disgusted when they see bad people, who perform badly, get filthy rich for no reason while they work hard to just make ends meet. It is not what the American way is supposed to be about and average people will tolerate the inequities in this system only so long. The American way is supposed to be you get rich when you work hard, and risk your wealth to make a great company and you are rewarded when you succeed.
"I hope this post doesn't do that. Because that's not the objective at all."
Wow stop ignoring what I DID say in my first post which totally justified the package someone like Jobs get, and shot down your first post before your wrote it. And stop try to insert this random list of BS you made up in to my mouth, BS which has pretty much no connection to anything I said.
Believe it or not if you want to engage in a coherent debate with someone you do in fact have to read and understand what the other person said, respond coherently to what was actually said and not just start spewing random garbage out of your own head or maybe pulling stuff out of your ass. To put it another way if my posts are too long or boring for you to bother to read please don't respond to them. Since you apparently have no clue what I actually said, it just makes you look stupid.
"Yeah, Steve Jobs is really diluting the value of that Apple stock with his huge compensation package. I wonder why the shareholders don't just get rid of him?"
Try reading my whole post smart ass:
"Now if the top officers are dazzling performers, creating a VERY successful company, where the stock price and salaries are going up, then an argument can be made that they are worth it."
"If a CEO gets an extra $100 and his employee gets an extra $1, is the employee worse off? No, he's better off by $1."
Because when the top officers of the company are getting these ridiculous compensation packages, salaries, staggering option grants, pension and golden parachutes, they are draining a finite pool for either the other shareholders, customers or workers. They are either diluting the value of the stock if they are abusing options and stock grants which punishes shareholders because it makes their stock less valuable. Or they are draining the pool so there is less many and less stock to give to ordinary workers as reward, or raising prices which screws customers and competitiveness.
In the case of options, these officers are being given no risk stock investments, they don't invest any of their capital, and stock is supposed to entail risking your capital to get the potential dividend, and the worst they can do is not make anything on them but they can often make a fortune with no risk, and a dubious amount of effort. Why should real shareholders put their capital at risk while the executives put nothing at risk except how much of a killing they might make if the stocks goes up or doesn't. As if this free money wasn't enough they seem to have all resorted to backdating to INSURE they made money even if their companies sucked. It is a form of gambling which is completely rigged so you can never lose.
Now if the top officers are dazzling performers, creating a VERY successful company, where the stock price and salaries are going up, then an argument can be made that they are worth it. Unfortunately in the U.S. the system of corprate governance and executive compensation has been complete corrupted, in particular by packing boards with cronies instead of responsible board members. Boards are now frequently rubber stamps and not responsible corprate governors. They are approving outrageous compensation for executive regardless of their performance, they in turn get great packages themselves, and as long as a director makes no waves he gets on more and more boards and gets richer and richer.
The tragic consequences are evident in, for example, the case of Home Depot's recently departed CEO. He raked in nearly a half billion in compensation during a tenure in which the companies stock price and performance was stagnant. His performance didn't justify a fraction of the compensation he got. All that money he DID get came from somewhere, out of the pockets of shareholders, customers and workers most probably. If customers paid for it meant higher prices, or lower wages for workers and probably less competitive company which translates in to stagnant performance, which is what Home Depot had.
This growing inequity in the U.S. simply isn't sustainable. When U.S. companies are run so horribly they are going to get their clocked cleaned by better governed corporations in other countries. When the inequities become to stark you will eventually reach a point of social upheaval if not open rebellion. The Progressive movement around the end of the 19th century is a good case study of what happens when ordinary people get screwed to lines the pockets of a tiny handful.
A key factor in the recent pounding the Republicans took in November is large numbers of lower and middle class Americans are finally waking up to the fact that they are getting poorer while a few are getting rich at staggering rate partially by abusing their government influence. Many voters are no longer being snowed by inflammatory issues like terrorism, abortion and gay marriage, and are realizing the basic structure of the American economy is being rigged against them and in favor or globalized multinationals and their executives who are getting very rich while most Americans are struggling to stay above water.
The key point is that success as a desktop OS REQUIRES a monoculture. You need basically one standard and it needs to maintain compatibility over time so that A) you develop a rich application base, B) users have excellent compatibility and interoperability with their peers and C) once you get an app you like and which works, it keeps working without needing to upgrade it every few months/years.
Its already a huge problem for Linux that there are two desktop GUI standards. It completely fractures the application base, hampers interoperability and dilutes developer resources. You frequently end up with two medicore apps, one KDE and one GNOME. Competition is good and all but the competition should be focused more in application space than on OS and GUI framework space.
Developing a bunch more fringe OS's is exactly the wrong thing to do if you want to displace Windows on the desktop. All that does is dilute developer resources even more and lead to even fewer and lower quality applications due to that dilution. The best thing that could happen to the Linux desktop at the moment, though it is impossible due to the religious wars that would ensue, would be to settle on one desktop GUI standard and consolidate down to a very small number of Linux distributions. One desktop distribution would be best, unless others serve some very specific need.
The bottomline is you want developers focused on high quality, innovative and interesting applications, not constantly reinventing the OS and GUI wheel. Desktop users care about applications, not really operating systems or GUI frameworks.
Linux and OSX have enough adoption that it would be possible for them to gain critical mass and to penetrate the desktop market further. It would take a freaking miracle for some other fringe OS to penetrate it on the PC. The only way it would happen is for an OS to take over through the consumer device space first, where some huge company decides on the OS, and have people start using a settop box or media server as their PC too. The problem in the consumer device space is the application set is usually EXTREMELY limited and not under user control.
Somewhat beyond the public apathy what you are seeing at work here are forces that are inherent flaws in Capitalism, flaws that are deeply ingrained and very difficult to change.
The mechanisms that drive Capitalism never choose "the right thing", they always favor "the profitable thing". Sometimes "the right thing" and "the profitable thing" are "the same thing" but that is often not the case. The fact is the exploitation of fossil fuels did in fact drive some enormous advances in standard of living, technological progress, economic well being, and the entire structure of modern society is completely dependent on them at the moment. A few forward thinking people figured out the dangers of releasing all that sequestered CO2 back in to the atmosphere a long time ago, in particular Joseph Fourier(also the genius behind the Fourier Transform) and Svante Arrhenius, but most people didn't worry about it until now because the earth was so big and the profits so good. When we started we weren't burning a billion tons of coal a year.
Energy is essential to industrialized and information age living, its not easy to produce cheaply and on large scale, so you can't exactly fault the people who created our massive dependence on fossil fuels for doing what they did, and most of them saw enormous potential for benefit, and profit so they reaped it. That is just the way Capitalism works. We decimated most whale species because they were also a great and profitable source of energy in their day in the form of whale oil. The right thing was probably not to wipe out the oceans whales, but the profitable thing for a while said go for it.
To rant against whalers, big Tobacco or Big Oil is kind of howling at the moon. You are really just ranting at the unfortunate down side of Capitalism, and for better or worst it is the economic system almost our entire world is using now. Unless you opt for some kind of Socialism where government planners benevolently pick "the right thing" over "the profitable thing" you are going to have profit obsessed people do some really horrible things to each other and the earth as a whole. That is the way the system is designed. So far precedent indicates Socialist government planners are equally bad when it comes to doing "the right thing".
It is an interesting mental exercise to think about the pros and cons of global warming. The fact is our planet has had much warmer periods than the current one and it survived, and there were periods when much of that CO2 sequestered in fossil fuels was in fact in our atmosphere. Its not entirely bad that much of the Northern Hemisphere doesn't have the bitterly cold winters that were so common not very many years ago, and that vast new regions at the poles are now going to finally come out of the last ice age and become habitable.
The obvious problem is that, thanks to human ingenuity and excessive population growth, we are probably going to precipitate these changes much faster than either humans, or most animal and plant species can cope, and the consequences to all species will probably be dire. There is a little problem that we've built so much of our society at sea level. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and thanks to our short sightedness due to our short life spans and brief recorded history, we didn't realize that sea level has always fluctuated through the earth's history. If you are building cities to last, the current sea level and islands like Manhattan are actually not a good choice. Perhaps the native Americans who sold Manhattan island to the Europeans had a longer view of things and realized it really wasn't worth much, and sure wasn't a good place to build a town, much less a city.
This raises another interesting puzzle in economics. If global warming does happen and sea levels rise the economic consequences will be devastating because vast quantities of capital will go underwater. At some point burning fossil fuels will cease to be the profitable thing, at least for everything at sea level,
" 9/11 was a US governemnt plot with controlled demolition"
Controlled demolitions, WTF? If you are gonna do conspiracy theories at least try to start with PLAUSIBLE conspiracy theories. When you have video of the fact the towers were hit by hijacked jets loaded with fuel, burned profusely and the collapse started at the burning floors I think you can take it as a given the towers collapsed because hijacked planes were flown in to them,
If you want to hatch conspiracy theories it is entirely plausible that some nefarious intelligence agency penetrated some cell of Islamic radicals and directed them to launch this attack thinking they were doing it for Bin Laden. It would take some serious mental illness to justify initiating such an attack against your own country, to advance your political aims, so I would rate this as not a very plausible conspiracy theory.
A far more plausible conspiracy theory is some intelligence agency was well aware of the Al Qaida directed plot, before it happened, and the powers that be decided to look the other way because they saw the enormous potential in a new "Pearl Harbor" to allow them to:
A. dramatically expand their hold on power in the U.S. and justify repressive measures like the Patriot act and various domestic spying programs B. to justify military adventures like the invasion of Iraq, which would NEVER have flown with the American people before 9/11. In a world of increasingly tight oil supplies dominating the Middle East militarily sure had to have some appeal to a bunch of oil men and the Saudi's were getting tired of hosting U.S. bases. C. a great tool to win future elections
It is more than a little prescient that the neocon cabal behind The New American Century which includes Cheney and Rumsfeld had already openly extolled the virtues of a modern Pearl Harbor to futher their goals.
The precedent for this kind of conspiracy already exists. The U.S. basically did exactly this before the original Pearl Harbor. The U.S., Britain and the Dutch decided to embargo oil shipments to Japan to counter their aggressive war against China. The Japanese military and industrial complex was massively dependent on oil imports especially from Dutch and British oil fields in Indonesia. The embargo painted Japan in to a nasty corner, and their one way out without capitulation was to do exactly what they did, seize the oil fields in Indonesia, and while they were at it launch preemptive blows at the feeble British and American military assets in the Pacific in the hope they would capitulate.
During this period the American people and a lot if its political leaders were isolationist and had no interest in getting entangled in a second World War in Europe. Roosevelt rightly saw an enormous danger from Nazi Germany to Britain and eventually to the U.S. and he needed an excuse to drag the U.S. in to the war before Britain was invaded. Provoking an incident with Japan worked perfectly. Now perhaps Roosevelt and the U.S. military didn't know exactly where or when the attack would be but they KNEW a Japanese attack was almost inevitable, and they could guess at least some of it would be aimed at the Phillipines or the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii. It wasn't exactly an accident that the Navy was keeping its precious carriers at see so they weren't as vulnerable to attack. General Billy Mitchell had years earlier accurately and presciently outlined the plan for a Japanese torpedo attack against the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.
It is entirely plausible the Pearl Harbor on 12/7 and the one on 9/11 were not entirely unwelcome events to the Machiavellian powers that be.
"...so far off from Republican ideals, that it is not even funny. Republicans used to be the ones who were for a strong military, smaller government, less government intrusion into our lives and lower taxes"
Not sure how you really believed that this is what the Republican party every really stood for, "strong military" is mutually exclusive from "smaller government" and "less government intrusion into our lives". A strong military inherently drives up spending, and when coupled with its shadow intelligence agency twin has been the engine for "intrusion into our lives". Republicans have always been against intrusion by the government in "economic" life, because it hurts their profits, and they have always been against a big welfare state and they still are kind of. But, they have a pretty horrible and long running record on government assaults on civil liberties. Lincoln set some of the precedents for suspension of Habeas corpus and spying on Americans. He also helped institute the first income tax, and of course the the real issue at the root of the Civil War was the attempt by the Republicans to dramatically expand the power of the Federal government at the direct expense of the rights given to states by the Constitution. Our huge, excessively powerful Federal government really started there. The last time the Republicans controlled Congress we were blessed with McCarthyism, he was a Republican, who melded with the defense industrial complex in a long running witch hunt against Communists, both real and imagined, which was a huge "intrusion in to our lives". And of course Richard Nixon, a Republican shredded the Constitution, and was engaged in a massive spying campaign which "intruded in to our lives". There is a wing in the Republican party that is true conservative and for actual small government and civil liberties but they are seldom the ones that actually run thing.
The only really new thing about the new Republican party, since Reagan, is they seem to have completely abandoned any pretense of fiscal responsibility as they rush to cut taxes, and dramatically expand military spending. This is kind of new. The key problem is they can't, at the same time, gut Social Security, Medicate or Medicaid because they are wildly popular especially with a potent voting block, Senior citizens. If they could kill them, and still get elected they probably would but they can't. So what we have now is we have our cake and we eat it too, we have massive socialism, massive military expenditures and tax cutting at the same time, so we have massive deficits. We get away with it as long as the huge U.S. economy manages to keep its head above water. It has a lot of momentum from its past glory behind it though chances are it will eventually go under, since its not very competitive in a globalized world that has recovered from World War II finally. Soon it may get ugly. Sometime not so far down the road all the younger people have paid so much in to Social Security and Medicare will discover they are not going to be getting much of it back because it is all gone, while today's seniors who paid in so little will have reaped a windfall return before the goose stopped laying the golden egg. The other possibility is the U.S. might have to gut its military, but the defense industrial complex is REALLY powerful now, and really entrenched so I wouldn't bet against them.
"lower taxes are only for large corporations"
Well you make it sound like the grand old Republican party doesn't stand for this, well they have ALWAYS been the party of cutting corprate taxes, and taxes on the wealthy. It has been the one issue where they have been faultlessly consistent for a really long time.
"hat latter possibility would cause the value of the dollar on the world market to seriously drop, and that would create huge inflation here in the US. "
While true according to the Economics text books, that is probably a little simplistic.
The dollar has been tanking for a while and it hasn't really caused inflation. One reason being we buy so much of what we buy from China now, and China's yuan is pegged to the dollar, mostly by China buying dollars and treasuries. I think oil is also still sold on world markets in U.S. dollars so it doesn't really inflate as the dollar tanks, and oil exporters have an interest in keeping the dollar propped up since they get so many of them for their oil. There has been a desire in some oil rich nations to price oil in Euros but the U.S. has used numerous forms of pressure to prevent it, though I'm not sure quite how oil is bought and sold today.
Now China could start dumping dollars but it would cause the Yuan to spike. That WOULD cause inflation at Walmart, but it would also destroy the huge competitive advantage China now has in selling to their best customer. At least on the near term China has a big incentive to peg the Yuan, buy U.S. dollars, and bleed the U.S. white through trade deficits, not through economic warfare. Now someday the Chinese might want to stick a knife in the U.S., and they just might, especially at some point where they have eclipsed the U.S. in economic and military power, and finished bleeding the U.S. white. But right now really no rational country would want to take down the U.S. economy because as it goes down it could well take the rest of the world with it and everyone would suffer.
A tanking U.S. dollar actually improves America's competitive position in world trade exports, a factor in why both Reagan and Bush have let the dollar tank. Of course in the increasingly complex globalized world you also have a skilled or educated and hard working underpaid work force, crappy or no benefits for workers, and actually make things you can export for an undervalued currency to help you compete.
"But it wasn't worth what we've done to ourselves in the past few years."
There was a hilarious bit on ABC news tonight. Charlie Gibson was hammering some newly elected Democratic congressmen about the war on Iraq, the polls saying people wanted out of Iraq, that they got elected to get us out of Iraq, what is the Democrat's plan on Iraq, etc. One of the congresswomen replied she was inclined to support George W's plan to surge troops in to Iraq even though Gibson is saying its overwhelmingly contrary to the will of the people. Why? Because George W. is, for better or worse, the Commander in Chief, with the implication that he does in fact command the military, not Congress, and Congress did in fact give him a sweeping blank check to invade Iraq after 9/11 and do whatever else he thought necessary to prevent another 9/11. Her come back to Charlie Gibson which was wondrous, if the American people don't like what's happening in Iraq now they shouldn't have voted for George W. Bush.... twice. If George W. is opening your mail, listening on your phone or sending you or your kin to Iraq, well you shouldn't have voted for him, especially in 2004 when it was obvious what kind of man he was. If you voted for George W. and you now don't like him or the war in Iraq then you know what, tough, you got what you asked for.
You see elections do have consequences. When tens of millions of Americans do something really stupid they should pay for it, and pay dearly. The people of Iraq certainly have, so should we. You see there is no good solution now in Iraq for the Democrats to throw on the table and they know it. All probable outcomes are bad in different ways. The only good strategy was to have not elected George W., or given him the blank check to go there in the first place. His dad knew full well that as bad as Saddam was, he was probably better than the alternatives, an Iran aligned Shia theocracy, Sunni's in open revolt against the Shia's, and a Kurdish state in the North seeking to gain control of Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iran that has a good chance of sparking a future war with Turkey.
For the last six years I've been deeply disturbed as the U.S. has running headlong to embrace an increasingly Fascist political party, but I'm equally disturbed now that the Democrats are back in control in Congress and everyone is thinking we've pulled back from the brink. You see the only thing that would have forced the American people to awake from their current coma of blissful ignorance, is for them to have to stare a real totalitarian government in the face and realize it was America's government, not one of some third world pisshole, and as in Nazi Germany they were the people that put it in power due to their own malice, avarice and stupidity. If Iraq hadn't gone south on the Bush administration they no doubt would have marched on to take down Syria and Iran, to dominate the Middle East and through the Middle East's oil the world. If Iraq hadn't gone south on them the Bush administration would probably have entrenched their control of the government, finished packing the Supreme court, and if they had been blessed with another 9/11 class event they would have REALLY dismantled the last bits of the Constitution and due process.
Iraq is in a lot of ways a bizarre mixed blessing. The quagmire in Iraq is probably the only thing that actually prevented the new hard right Republican party, from turning completely Fascist, and acquiring a stranglehold on power in the U.S. The American people should, in a way, be glad, that Katrina and Iraq went south on George W. so his party could no longer successfully manipulate the minds of mentally challenged people in to voting in to power people who are corrupt, power mad, paranoid, malevolent, manipulative and incompetent. Of course they end up electing Democrats and they are corrupt, power mad, paranoid, malevolent etc, they just go about it differently.
My fear is that now that we seemed to have pulled back from the brink,
"are clued up to the vastness/emptyness of space,..."
Uh, wrong. There are asteroids in reasonably close proximity to Earth which contain enough metals to satisfy our planets insatiable need for metals for basically ever. Why is this important? There was an interesting new law passed in the U.S.recently outlawing the melting down of U.S. coins? Why? Because at current copper and nickel demand, the price of the copper in a penny is now worth something like 1 and 3/4 cents and nickels are work 7-8 cents so you could make money just going to banks, demanding all of the coins you could get, melting them, and reselling the metal to a salvage yard which would probably ship it to China, as ballast in a container ship. Profit!!
Now it would be expensive to mine asteroids, but unless we A) contain our population growth, B) become much better at recycling precious resources or C) become adept at very deep mining we are going to start running out of things we depend on a lot like copper relatively soon. Faced with the finite resources of our planet the only other solution is for us to tap the resources in that space you thought was so empty.
Its not an imminent problem but it is a serious one. Earth is inherently a finite resource. Unless we learn to operate it in a sustainable, and limited manner...and Capitalism is notoriously bad at sustainable and limited... we will eventually be compelled to move in to space to find resources and living space. If we foolishly create a runaway greenhouse effect on this precious resource, Mars may be our only life boat as barran and painful as it would be.
It should also be noted that space is where a thing called the Sun is and it is the source of nearly all our energy, whether it be stored in fossil fuels, hydroelectric, wind or direct solar. We could tap directly in to a significant energy source by tapped solar power in space. The Sun is also probably depositing large quantities of deuterium and tritium on the surface of the Moon, something we need if we ever manage to do fusion power.
I'm the first to agree that NASA starting in about 1973, with the help of various Presidents. Congresses and corrupt contractors has done an amazing job of draining the last bit of enthusiasm for space exploration from everyone, but it is eventually something we will probably have to do, and the sooner we lay the foundation the better. Besides which now that we live on a planet with no frontiers left, space is the only place for adventurers to go and to find new frontiers. I pity a human race which has no pioneers.
I think America's failing enthusiasm for space exploration is a symptom more of an empire in steep decline. Americans are a lot more about self indulgence with their iPod cocoons, video games and obesity, so they've probably lost the ability or desire to do anything hard. The Chinese appear to still be VERY interested in space exploration, so if the U.S. doesn't do it they no doubt will. They are building huge reservoirs of Walmart's dollars to do it with, and they still teach the science, math and engineering to their young people so they have the tools to actually do it with.
The speech Kennedy game when he launched the Apollo program bears remembering:
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
Now you could probably do other important things that are hard, like solve our energy dilemma, global warming and population crisis too. But damn people, if you aren't gonna do things that are amazing and hard, you are a waste of precious space on this planet.
"Surely if Diebold can make a secure ATM there is no reason why it cannot make secure and reliable e-voting apparatus in which the public has confidence"
This is such a seriously foolish quote it stopped me from bothering to RTFA. ATM's and evoting machines are doing two completely different tasks, there are countless reasons a company can succeed at ATM's and not at evoting.
ATM's by definition retain and want no anonymity, while voting must retain anonymity or you risk tyrants and bureaucrats monitoring who people voted for and retaliating against or rewarding them. The need to insure anonymity vastly complicates the problem of also insuring integrity of the count. Evoting and internet voting advocates often dismiss the importance of anonymity as they pitch how convenient it would be to vote over the Internet. Voting over the Internet would be insane. Maybe anonymity is not so important....until people gain power who want to keep it by any means necessary, then anonymity is crucial. If people think their vote is being monitored they vote the way they think is safest, which is why dictators run sham elections where they get 99.9% of the vote. When people know their vote is being watched they vote for the dictator every time, unless they are suicidal.
ATM's are constantly audited by both the user and financial institution that runs them. If they recorded a false transaction the books wouldn't balance and either the bank or the customer would be instantly unhappy. The voter has absolutely no way to audit an all electronic system to insure it actually counted their vote as cast. If there were one it would almost certainly run afoul of the mandate for anonymity.
The only audit trail that is acceptable is the evoting machine produces a paper ballot the voter can check and which is the thing which is actually counted and even more importantly recounted. Thats how the evoting machines where I vote work, they just produce a paper ballot that is checkable by the voter, you can fill the same ballot out by hand, they go to an optical scanner to be counted and they can be recounted by hand if necessary. With this approach the evoting machines are mostly a very expensive convenience and are really not worth the money being spent on them for the average voter.
If there was an ounce of sanity in this country evoting machines would have been confined to a couple machines in each precinct specifically for the needs of disabled voters, which would help them produce a paper ballot without requiring someone to help them and meddle in how they vote. Unfortunately in the wake of the 2000 debacle, large amounts of federal money were dangled in the front of greedy Republican friendly companies like Diebold and ESS and they are now vast numbers of enormously expensive machines in precincts across the country. Beyond the subsidized initial expense the maintenance costs are enormous, since once you buy a system you are locked in to that vendor and their support contract. The logisitics of deploying them are also expensive, extremely prone to failure, and frequently overwhelm the civil servants and poll volunteers who have to deal with them. Elections are something which occurs once a year or every two years. Creating this enormously expensive technological infrastructure for something that occurs infrequently is insane, It is mostly designed to enrich the companies that feed off it, and that was true of all the mechanical systems which predate evoting, its just worse with computers in the mix.
The only small case you can make for evoting is it prevents people from making mistakes like voting for two candidates in a race. Sorry but if you screw up your ballot its your fault your vote will be disqualified.
Voting really is something best left to people marking paper ballots with pens, and then counting them by hand or maybe an optical scanner if you want to be real high tech, and then ALWAYS with MANDATORY hand counts of random precincts to insure the system is on the up and up. This really isn't the rocket science we've turned it in to.
Re:Rumsfeld was not the architect of the Iraq war
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Rumsfeld Stepping Down
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Not sure you can really trust Wikipedia to be a definitive source on controversial issues especially relating to Israel. They have had some serious problems with people with political agendas altering their articles on controversial topics relating to Israel, for example the article on the controversial massacre at Deir Yassin. There were times I've gone back to that article and its been completely rewritten from a pro Israeli perspective downplaying any suggestion of a massacre there, other times its fairly balanced othertimes its somewhat pro Arab. Wikipedia does great on factual topics, its horrible on controversial political ones.
It might have been a bit of an overstatement by the grandparent to say Iraq was entirely due to pressure from the pro Israeli lobby, but you are just as wrong to say there was no influence from there. Joe Lieberman is a poster boy for the pro Israel lobby and he was, and still is, one of the biggest cheerleaders of that foolish war, if anyone deserved to get thrown out of office over it was him, but oh well. Its just as true that Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle were prime movers within the DOD to make the case for it and they are rabidly pro Israel, and leading members of the pro Israel lobby. In fact most of the Straussian neoconservatives who pushed this foolish war on the U.S. are Jewish and rabidly pro Israel. William Kristol, Fox News mouth piece for the Straussian neocons, is another member of the pro Israel neocon cabal that pushed us in to the war.
Trying to say that the pro Israel lobby didn't help push us in to Iraq is just simply not true. I wager both they and Israel are regretting at this point since they are now a facing a failed state in Iraq and the rise of a pro Iranian Shia theocracy there, and an emboldened Iran and Hezzbolah that is probably more of a threat to them than the boxed in Saddam was.
"Having Rumsfeld step down weeks ago would have validated Democrat "
Probably true if it had happened out of the blue. If all the Republican Congressional candidates had gotten together en masse and demanded Rumsfeld's resignation a couple months ago, Bush had actually done it, and they'd gotten someone like McCain in there it could have probably been a huge net plus for the Republicans and could have turned the election. It would have shown the President as breaking out of his bubble and listening to the people's representatives in his party, and taking a new tack on Iraq instead of just staying the course and slowing throwing American soldiers and dollars in to a never ending meat grinder. Of course McCain is likely to increase the troop strength in Iraq not decrease it and no telling how that would play with Americans especially if you had to start a draft to get the cannon fodder.
A few congressional candidates did demand Rummy's resignation at the last minute when they realized they were in serious trouble over Iraq but it was to little to late and just looked like a cheap political tactic to save their skins.
It was just beyond bizarre for Bush to pat Dick and Don on the back right before the election and say they were going to be there for the duration of his second term. I can't seriously believe he had really decided to get rid of him at that point. It makes him look either deceitful, foolish or both.
For people who used to be pretty politically astute they seemed to have developed a real tin political ear. Maybe they never really had a good ear, they just noticed the Democrats suched and they could ride 9/11 and and gay bashing to victory for a while. Rumsfeld and Cheney are popular with almost no one at this point, Democrats or Republicans. The only people still in their court are the rabid pro Israeli lobby, like Lieberman, who got us in to this mess in the first place. At this point Israel and Iran are about the only two places where there are still people who still like the war in Iraq, Israel because it got rid of one of the two biggest threats on their borders, one who shot missiles at them, and Iran because it appears they will be the big winner of this foolish war in the end. I wager even Israel will regret the whole thing when an Iranian friendly Shia theocracy is in full bloom in Iraq. Turkey will also be royally pissed when Northern Iraq turns in to an independent Kurdistan and tries to seize the Kurdish regions of Turkey.
"The real threat to democracy is people who don't really care about what's going on in government."
That is part of the problem but the real basis of the problem is we've settled in to an entrenched two party system. Those two parties have established a complete strangehold on the electoral process and as long as they are both equally bad they get away with it, they can just ping pong power between each other while the country heads in to the dumper.
For example:
- The 2 parties have used numerous methods to block the formation of a viable 3rd party with a chance to win, in many states by placing huge burdens on 3rd parties to just get on the ballot, and of course most 3rd parties have been dominated by fringe candidates and supporters that just don't have the staying power or wide enough appeal to win. The media compounds the problem by painting anyone not Republican or Democrat as a nut and a novelty depriving them of legitimacy in the minds of voters. So we have a system in which both parties are bad and they have no incentive to improve because the competition isn't any better and there is no viable 3rd choice.
- Many states completely disenfranchise independent voters since they can't vote in primaries. This means the Democrats and the Republicans pick the two choices and independents hold their nose and pick the worst of the two. Independents have no say in the process of picking good candidates and even in the states they can vote in the primary they are just spoilers or king makers of the two party's candidates. You want to shake up the system, make it law that independents have their own primary and can nominate their own candidate. If you got good sensible, non extremist candidates running and independents put good people on the ballot, people may well start leaving the two parties in droves for independency. Many people now hate both parties with a passion but feel locked in to them because if they go independent they are largely disenfranchised. I often wonder if our political system might actually work better if there were no party affiliations and no party line votes either on ballots or on legislation. You get elected on merit and ideas and not on party affiliation. Legislation gets passed if it is sound and garners enough support, not because one party wants to shove their polarizing agenda through. Maybe less legislation would get passed but that would probably be an improvement too.
- The 2 parties, when they gain control of state legislatures, have completely gerrymandered every congressional district to insure they will win in an as many districts as possible, i.e. put all the minorities in one contorted urban district where a minority candidate wins but the Republicans get a lock on 2-3 seats in the suburbs as a result. Gerrymandering is probably the single most corrosive force working against Democracy today, since it promotes candidates on the extremes who pander to their rigged base consituency. Also as long as they get their parties nomination there is a low chance of them every getting voted out so they have no accountability to their constituents. You want to fix the House, come up with a color blind algorithm to create house districts somewhat randomly and based on simple geometry and geography, and hopefully make more districts competitive and diverse. The challenge is to not completely deprive minorties of representation in the process.
A final problem is the simple fact really good smart people don't usually run for office any more, if they ever did. Their simply aren't any great statesman anymore. The people who run are nearly universally bad people, they are manipulative opportunists, not people who want to pass sound laws and work for the betterment of their country. If good people do run the manipulative opportunists beat them. Getting elected sucks, especially getting on your knees for campaign contributions, the pay sucks(until you leave and turn in to a lobbyist), the scrutiny of your life sucks, and when you get in office y
Granted it is quite possible these were just a few cases of machines being messed up, and should be no cause for alarm. But you know what, it COULD be a cause for alarm and your attempt to dismiss it is just as bad if not worse than the people who are trying to hype this in to a conspiracy. It COULD be an attempt to rig the election. The fact is there have been seriously irregularities in 2000, 2002, 2004 and will probably be again this year and people keep just downplaying them like you just did, and the potential for abuse is getting worse each election.
For some reason Americans have the enormous capacity to disbelieve anyone would steal one of their elections. I hate to break it to you but election rigging is widespread throughout history and throughout the world. It has happened in the U.S. before, in Kennedy-Nixon in 1960 in Kennedy's favor and again in Florida in 2000 to favor the Governor's brother. If there was ever an election that was going to be stolen its this one, because the party in power is in serious trouble, they are drunk on their power and they have this righteous self delusion that they are the only ones capable of governing. Those are the kind of people who do rig elections and still sleep at night.
I hate to break it to you but if these machines needed to be recalibrated multiple times during the course of the election they are fundamentally flawed and should be thrown out. It would be relative easy for someone to figure out that they could improperly calibrate a percentage of the machines in one parties favor and manipulate an election, and if anyone notices they just say what you just said.
The fact is all voting systems have a margin of error, but these electronic systems have a staggeringly high margin for error, and even worse potential for intentional abuse especially all the ones that have no paper trail for a proper recount. I think going back to paper ballots with X's on them and teams of little old ladies counting them would be just wondeful, thank you.
The other damning thing about electronic voting is they are a massive drain on the resources of the local governments deploying them, and our Federal tax dollars. They are proving to be ENORMOUSLY expensive to maintain, often timea 10X what was promised. Once a local governmet picks one and buys them they are at the complete mercy of a near monopoly that can often charge as much as they feel like to keep them working from now on.
Our motto for evoting machines, just like most of our politicians, should be THROW THE BUMS OUT.
P.S.
Not sure the Republican's need to rig the election since they pulled out their secret weapon. Mr Skull and Bones himself, John Kerry. John could you please keep your stupid ass mouth shut, or better yet join the Republican party. You are the single greatest weapon in th Republican campaign to inflict Fascism on us. I, as have most people, have had enough of you, because you are a completely clueless preppy rich kid, just like the ahole sitting in the White House. How the hell did you make as far as you have in politics when you can't seem to open your mouth without saying something stupid.
" China and India, the two most populus countries in the world, had high population growth, but now that their economy has dramatically improved their birth rates are dropping."
Do you actually have a reference to support this or did you pluck it out of your....
The one reference I found in a quick Google search indicated one of the first declines in Chinese population growth occurred in the 70's when they were still Communist and before the boom and was largely due to social engineering efforts by the government. They've also implemented a relatively brutal one child per family policy for a number of years which if it worked would be the main reason for population decline, though the study I read suggested it really hadn't worked that well because the rural poor were defying it at every turn.
The economic booms in China and India are confined to relatively small regions and populations in both and I seriously doubt they are having a dramatic impact on their overall population growth yet. A big majority in both countries are still rural and poor and are seeing little benefit from the booms in a few booming regions.
Actually your analogy is the only thing that sounds ridiculous. Hummers are a luxury. Having children is an essential biological process necessary for preservation of your species and genetic material. A spouse and children are a really valuable thing to have when you age or have a serious illness because they will hopefully take care of you versus dumping you on the mercies of strangers in public health care. Its not as true as it was but children also propagate some continuity in wealth creation, especially in home ownership, farms and small business.
As you grow older I think you might realize that having no children means your life has substantially less meaning than if you have a couple well raised children. It fosters continuity and stability which is why governments like marriage and children so much.
I wont dispute there is a lot of validity in your point that people having a LOT of children, and getting government subsidies for it is probably a net negative, but it is an extremely desirable part of societal well being for people to have one or two children so tax breaks aren't an unreasonable thing for that. Its kind of an unfortunate fact of life that capitalism, nationalism and militarism thrives on population growth so governments routinely strive to fuel it, until it reaches the point overpopulation becomes a net negative as it has in India and China.
"neither hetero nor homo couples get any preferrential treatment over singles. Screw government interference)."
I agree wholeheartedly, but its probably not realistic to expect social engineering by government to stop anytime soon. There are deeply ingrained biological, political, religious, economic and social compulsions to promote the stereotypical "family". If everyone stops having children and raising them properly then social structure collapse. As most developed nations have instituted massive social safety nets for seniors, and as life expectency has dramatically increased there is a social compulsion to make sure people breed more so there are enough young people to bleed white to support seniors who are often living 20-30 years past retirement and are receiving extensive and expensive medical care. Affluence and education actually leads people to have fewer children which is bad, while the poor and uneducated produce ever more kids, so politicians are obsessed with stepping in.
Japan is currently in the forefront of developed countries with declining population and a huge economic and social problem providing a safety net for its seniors. There are only three solutions, cut benefits to seniors and threaten their quality of life or survival, jack up taxes and bleed the young ever more which hammers economic growth or try to engineer the production of more children through things like tax incentives.
In a massively overpopulated planet it would be extremely desirable if we actually did have a big population contraction. Unfortunately population IS contracting among the affluent and well educated and still exploding in the 3rd world among the poor and uneducated which is bad.
So the bottomline is there is are a host of reasons why government in developed countries engage in social engineering favoring the married with children occurs and is unlikely to ever stop. Religious bias among politicians also compels them to promote the Adam and Eve family.
Tax breaks also win votes from the married with children crowd who are probably more likely to vote than partying singles. It is also a fact that raising children is expensive and is a big financial burden on families that singles don't have and they can use some help.
There are a lot of days when I really don't appreciate paying to educate someone else's juvenile delinquents especially when that education is so horrible in the U.S. and is doing such an incredibly poor job with the most gifted kids. The "No Child Left Behind" obsession with the least able students is pure insanity for social well being. We should be pouring maximum resources in the most talented students to insure they get world class education and encouraging the least able in to vocational education where they can find skills suited to their abilities. In reality I think "No Child Left Behind" was more focused on compelling all kids to develop the basic skills necessary for military server and to give military recruiters unlimited access to young children to try to maximize the supply of cannon fodder without instituting a draft. I really think "No Child Left Behind" is really militarism posing as education and is seriously biased to getting the least gifted students prepped for enlisted duty in the military.
"Only 403 people renounced U.S. citizensip in 2002"
Thought I should it will be very interesting to see if this number starts spiking soon. It usually takes years to establish new citizenship and renounce your old one, so we probably wont know until we see numbers in 2006-2010 how many people have opted to flee the insanity that is the new Fasco-Republican party.
"The passport is nothing more than the evolution of the Lord's Chit"
This is probably the most insightful comment on this topic so far. Its the simple answer as to why more people haven't left the U.S. as its tilted to Fascism.
The fact is it is pretty hard to emigrate from the U.S., renounce your citizenship, and the process creates such high barriers most people wont run the gauntlet unless they are desperate. Most people instead opt to sit and wait and hope the country comes to its senses some day. Never underestimate the stupidity of American voters though, or the ability of the malevolent powers that be to manipulate them in to doing stupid things using fear mongering, propaganda and wedge issues.
Only 403 people renounced U.S. citizensip in 2002 and most were people who had immigrated to the U.S. and decided to return to their homeland.
Here is a somewhat humorous and sad article on why its a pain to kiss your U.S. citizenship goodbye. When this article was written there were still a few Caribbean islands selling citizenships for dollars but the U.S. has been using political and economic pressure to shut them down mostly to prevent wealthy Americans from escaping U.S. taxes.
Fact is, as long as you are a U.S. citizen you are owned by the U.S. government and you can't escape that fact unless you consent to be owned by some other country, it usually takes years to do that, you cant have a criminal record or HIV, and you usually have to clear years worth of hurdles that are usually more painful than just staying where you are and hope things get better. If you ever commit a crime, even a relatively minor one like drug offenses, you are pretty much enslaved to the U.S. because chances are no one else will take you unless you are rich enough to grease some palms or willing to be an illegal alien.
If you still choose to emigrate note you have to file IRS tax returns every year until you renounce citizenship, and hope tax treaties keep you from getting taxed in both your new home and the old one. The IRS may not leave you alone even after you renounce if they think some of your wealth belong to them.
You also cant legally emigrate or renounce your citizenship to escape military service. So if you joined the military before 9/11 to get that college education and not to fight an ugly illegal war in Iraq you are stuck until Uncle Sam lets you go. If the draft comes back you also wont be able to emigrate to escape it. It could be political suicide for whomever institutes a draft, but it could well happen since Uncle Sam will need more cannon fodder if Iraq continues to go south, and the U.S. opts to "Stay the Course", or if places like Iran or North Korea go south too. The U.S. barely has the cannon fodder for the current wars, fewer people want to volunteer, so if they need many more targets at all the draft will be back.
So it usually takes years, is usually not easy, and you wont be free of Uncle Sam until you've succeeded in gaining citizenship elsewhere and renounced U.S. citizenship. During this multi year process a myriad of things can go wrong that derail the whole process, a minor scrap with the law in your new home, can torpedo the whole process for example. Somewhere during the process, or worse right after you renounce your U.S. citizenship, the U.S. could come to its senses, elect a moderate sensible government, while your new home could go off the political deep end. Take comfort that the chances the U.S. will elect a moderate, sensible government look to be pretty low lately.
Unless you are attempting refugee status, and no country is going to given an American refugee status, chances are you need to be either very affluent or you are going to need a company to sponsor and employ you. If you have a nice employer and a job you like this isn't so bad, but there is a wicked catch. Your residence in your new country is often almost completely dependent on that employer, they know
"For the first time (as far as we can tell) there is a species on Earth that is developing the technology to avert future mass extinctions and violent climate change"
We haven't developed ANYTHING to do what you are absent mindedly dreaming of, nor are we likely to until there is PROFIT in it and there isn't much profit in it at present. Our technological advances are fueling violent climate change and species extinction not preventing it. The only thing we have on your list is we are tracking asteroids so we MIGHT spot one that will be a planet killer, and we might spot it in time to do something about it, but we are sorely lacking in any means to do it nor are we making any effort to develop it. Again no profit in it until we are staring a planet killer in the face, and we may not see one of those for millions of years. We have zero capacity to do anything about a killer volcanoes and earthquakes and probably never will. Maybe we will develop clean, renewable, plentiful power sources but at present those making a fortune off fossil fuels have been extremely successful in obstructing the development of better alternatives.
I don't think I would be conning myself that traveling to other galaxies, or even another star will solve our problems. I doubt we will even make it to another planet in a sustainable way before our species exterminates itself. I think you've been watching a little to much Star Trek. I had similar delusions when I was a kid. Gee how romantic space travel would be and how it would solve all our problems. Get real dude, there is value in having dreams and aspiring to do hard things, but not to the point you stop dealing with realities of here and now.
The simple truth is that at present the planet Earth is the only biosphere we have and even know of that works for us and offers us a pleasant life. We should be doing everything in our power to keep it in one piece and keep it operating on a sustainable level instead of thinking if we screw it up we will just hop in the Enterprise and head to a new one. We are struggling to just get to back to the moon, and its a simple fact that compared to Earth every other planetary body in our solar systems absolutely sucks by comparison and there is no telling if there any or many other biospheres nearby that are even close. I assure you trying to survive on the Moon or Mars will be a purely miserable experience by comparison, nor are we likely to make it to even our nearest stellar neighbor in centuries. Now maybe mining asteroids or generating power in space will help us solve some of our problems, if so hurrah but I wouldn't count on it because it will be enormously hard.
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Obviously you DIDN'T READ MY POST. Because I SAID hardcore journalists ARE very left leaning. They are also intelligent and well educated and liberalism is well correlated to advanced education and intellect. The key point is the big corprate entities they work for aren't left leaning, many of the editors they work for aren't left leaning, and many of the talking head celebrities that dominate talk TV and talk radio now are VERY right leaning. There is a lot more to the modern media mix than grunt "journalist". You are conveniently choosing ignore that fact and to focus on the only one part of the mix that is liberal and ignore all the powerful parts that aren't.
Its also a fact that many journalists today, especially talking head TV types are going to abandon their personal beliefs in favor of whatever view point drives their ratings the best so most are blowing with the wind, Anderson Cooper being a sterling example. They will also generally do and say whatever their editors and bosses tell them to, since most of them will sacrifice their ethical position personal beliefs to stay employed and to get ahead in a very competitive business.
" You're also ignoring that the leftist point of view permeates most broadcast TV quite thoroughly (Yes, except for Fox)."
Wow is that a log right wingers will never stop sawing. A case in point is CNN. Yes it used to be a very left leaning news network and being the first 24 hour network, and a every popular one early on, it did infuriate the right. It was run by Ted Turner then and it reflected his very left leaning bias. THAT WAS A LONG TIME AGO. If you've actually watched CNN lately you might discover it lurched very far to the center if not the right. Its not owned by Ted Turner any more, its owned by a coprate behemoth. It spends a LOT more time covering religion and business than it ever used to. Headline News now has Nancy Grace and Glen Beck in primtime and they are most certainly not left leaning. Lou Dobbs certainly isn't left wing, neither is Anderson Cooper. Not sure what Cooper's bias is, other than rampant self promotion. Christian Amanpour is certainly left leaning as is CNN international but they are catering to an audience outside the U.S. that wont watch right wing American flag waving and lunatic fringe...like Fox.
Two things changed CNN and you just didn't notice:
- Their management changed from Ted Turner to Times Warner
- They've been fighting a losing ratings battle with Fox and they've become a lot more like Fox in a misguided attempt to compete
Two things happened in general that pushed MOST news organization to the right:
- 9/11 and rampant patriotism baiting and flag waving that followed.
- Republicans came to completely dominate the government and most news organization were VERY reluctant to challenge them when they were riding high in power and polls.
If the news media was inherently and completely left leaning some of them would have challenged the rational for the Iraq war before it happened. They almost universally cheered it on, and had embeds riding in HumVees glorifying it, which is not something an inherently left biased media would have done.
Only in the last year or so have news organization started to drift back to the left. Why? Because the Republicans and the right wing stopped being popular and are now increasingly out of power. People started to realize they were actually horrible leaders so news organizations are a lot more willing to attack the right than they were a couplee years ago.
Unfortunately news organizations live and die by ratings and advertising. When the country swung to the right so did a lot of news organizations, now that the country is moving center, left so are a lot of news organizations.
Bottomline why don't you right wingers stop pushing this nonsense the media is massively left biased. It simply isn't true any more. Talk radio for example is massively right biased. The New York Times, pilloried for its left wing bias, was also the leader perpetrator, thanks to Judith Miller, of the myth that Iraq was developing WMD's and was the leading media outlet, along with Fox, that suckered the American people in to going in to Iraq.
The one inherent left bias is that many real journalists are well educated, smart and left leaning. But this is more than countered by celebrity talking heads like O'Reilly and Limbaugh who are unabashedly right wing, and also by the fact that most of those liberal journalists are working for right leaning corporations and editors. For Washington Post liberalism there is Wall Street Journal conservatism.
It is easy in concept, difficult in practice. Boards need to be appointed which have more of an adversarial role towards their executives and who strive to compensate all employees in a company based on their performance and contribution to success. Shareholders in particular need to be more proactive in the companies in which they are stake holders to hold their boards and executives to a standard that if you don't perform they don't get rewarded and if they succeed they get rewarded handsomely. The fatal flaw in the current system is bad performers get rewarded just as well, sometimes better, than good performers.
Unfortunately today investing in stock is a lot more like placing a bet on a roulette table than investing in a business. No one actually cares what happens in the stocks they own, they just want it to go up so they can cash their chips. An incompetent exec who pumps the stock is better than one who builds a sound business but doesn't pump the stock, as long as you get out before it crashes. Most boards and execs today are also not really focused on building successful companies which will last, they are trying to make their killing, get their FU money, get their yacht and at that point they are above the system and the rest of us. Greed has always been there, there have always been bad execs and bad investments, today it is just becoming more pervasive.
"Ok, I read it."
Obviously you didn't or you have real reading comprehension problem because you just did the same thing in this post you did in your second post. You just inserted a bunch of words in to my mouth I didn't say even if you are granted huge license to paraphrase. I think the fatal flaw in your posts is your willingness to paraphrase and create a reality distortion field in the process. Try sticking to direct quotes of what I say and not making shit up, pretending I said it, and rebutting something you said, not me.
Let me try to restart my original argument since you didn't get it and probably wont get it this time either.
Executives who perform well and lead their companies to success, deserve to be well compensated. Executives who risk their personal wealth and very hard work to build their company from scratch and succeed deserve huge compensation, Sam Walton for example. Executives like those at Exxon recently who were lucky beneficiaries of skyrocketing oil prices are in a gray area. A complete idiot could succeed running an oil company when prices are spiking so their is a question as to whether the ex CEO of Exxon deserved to get filthy rich for being in the right place at the right time.
But, there has been in recent years a dizzying array of apparently incompetent executives who have become fabulously wealthy either because:
A. The board of directors granted them compensation far beyond their real value, performance or the success of their companies on their watch, the ex CEO of Home Depot being just the most recent of many. This is a direct result of boards which have been corrupted and are failing at their most basic role of oversight.
B. They engaged in fraudulent and unsound business practices to inflate the price of their stock so they could make a killing and get out before the house of cards collapsed, WorldCom and Enron just being the poster children but there have been way to many especially during the bubble.
Their has been a fundamental flaw developing in executive compensation starting in the 80's in places like junk bonds and corrupt Savings and Loans. It widened in to a giant crack during the dotcom bubble as a bunch of geeks got fabulously wealthy on fantasy business plans posing as real companies. Now it appears every executive who makes it to the top of a publicly traded company thinks it is their god given right to get millions to hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation even if their performance is somewhere between mediocre and disastrous. I blame the dot com bubble in particular because it set the expectation that everyone who makes it to VP or above in a big publicly traded company must get rich whether they deserve it or not.
Its a simple fact that average Americans are disgusted when they see bad people, who perform badly, get filthy rich for no reason while they work hard to just make ends meet. It is not what the American way is supposed to be about and average people will tolerate the inequities in this system only so long. The American way is supposed to be you get rich when you work hard, and risk your wealth to make a great company and you are rewarded when you succeed.
"I hope this post doesn't do that. Because that's not the objective at all."
Well you failed again IMHO.
Wow stop ignoring what I DID say in my first post which totally justified the package someone like Jobs get, and shot down your first post before your wrote it. And stop try to insert this random list of BS you made up in to my mouth, BS which has pretty much no connection to anything I said.
Believe it or not if you want to engage in a coherent debate with someone you do in fact have to read and understand what the other person said, respond coherently to what was actually said and not just start spewing random garbage out of your own head or maybe pulling stuff out of your ass. To put it another way if my posts are too long or boring for you to bother to read please don't respond to them. Since you apparently have no clue what I actually said, it just makes you look stupid.
"Yeah, Steve Jobs is really diluting the value of that Apple stock with his huge compensation package. I wonder why the shareholders don't just get rid of him?"
Try reading my whole post smart ass:
"Now if the top officers are dazzling performers, creating a VERY successful company, where the stock price and salaries are going up, then an argument can be made that they are worth it."
"If a CEO gets an extra $100 and his employee gets an extra $1, is the employee worse off? No, he's better off by $1."
Because when the top officers of the company are getting these ridiculous compensation packages, salaries, staggering option grants, pension and golden parachutes, they are draining a finite pool for either the other shareholders, customers or workers. They are either diluting the value of the stock if they are abusing options and stock grants which punishes shareholders because it makes their stock less valuable. Or they are draining the pool so there is less many and less stock to give to ordinary workers as reward, or raising prices which screws customers and competitiveness.
In the case of options, these officers are being given no risk stock investments, they don't invest any of their capital, and stock is supposed to entail risking your capital to get the potential dividend, and the worst they can do is not make anything on them but they can often make a fortune with no risk, and a dubious amount of effort. Why should real shareholders put their capital at risk while the executives put nothing at risk except how much of a killing they might make if the stocks goes up or doesn't. As if this free money wasn't enough they seem to have all resorted to backdating to INSURE they made money even if their companies sucked. It is a form of gambling which is completely rigged so you can never lose.
Now if the top officers are dazzling performers, creating a VERY successful company, where the stock price and salaries are going up, then an argument can be made that they are worth it. Unfortunately in the U.S. the system of corprate governance and executive compensation has been complete corrupted, in particular by packing boards with cronies instead of responsible board members. Boards are now frequently rubber stamps and not responsible corprate governors. They are approving outrageous compensation for executive regardless of their performance, they in turn get great packages themselves, and as long as a director makes no waves he gets on more and more boards and gets richer and richer.
The tragic consequences are evident in, for example, the case of Home Depot's recently departed CEO. He raked in nearly a half billion in compensation during a tenure in which the companies stock price and performance was stagnant. His performance didn't justify a fraction of the compensation he got. All that money he DID get came from somewhere, out of the pockets of shareholders, customers and workers most probably. If customers paid for it meant higher prices, or lower wages for workers and probably less competitive company which translates in to stagnant performance, which is what Home Depot had.
This growing inequity in the U.S. simply isn't sustainable. When U.S. companies are run so horribly they are going to get their clocked cleaned by better governed corporations in other countries. When the inequities become to stark you will eventually reach a point of social upheaval if not open rebellion. The Progressive movement around the end of the 19th century is a good case study of what happens when ordinary people get screwed to lines the pockets of a tiny handful.
A key factor in the recent pounding the Republicans took in November is large numbers of lower and middle class Americans are finally waking up to the fact that they are getting poorer while a few are getting rich at staggering rate partially by abusing their government influence. Many voters are no longer being snowed by inflammatory issues like terrorism, abortion and gay marriage, and are realizing the basic structure of the American economy is being rigged against them and in favor or globalized multinationals and their executives who are getting very rich while most Americans are struggling to stay above water.
The key point is that success as a desktop OS REQUIRES a monoculture. You need basically one standard and it needs to maintain compatibility over time so that A) you develop a rich application base, B) users have excellent compatibility and interoperability with their peers and C) once you get an app you like and which works, it keeps working without needing to upgrade it every few months/years.
Its already a huge problem for Linux that there are two desktop GUI standards. It completely fractures the application base, hampers interoperability and dilutes developer resources. You frequently end up with two medicore apps, one KDE and one GNOME. Competition is good and all but the competition should be focused more in application space than on OS and GUI framework space.
Developing a bunch more fringe OS's is exactly the wrong thing to do if you want to displace Windows on the desktop. All that does is dilute developer resources even more and lead to even fewer and lower quality applications due to that dilution. The best thing that could happen to the Linux desktop at the moment, though it is impossible due to the religious wars that would ensue, would be to settle on one desktop GUI standard and consolidate down to a very small number of Linux distributions. One desktop distribution would be best, unless others serve some very specific need.
The bottomline is you want developers focused on high quality, innovative and interesting applications, not constantly reinventing the OS and GUI wheel. Desktop users care about applications, not really operating systems or GUI frameworks.
Linux and OSX have enough adoption that it would be possible for them to gain critical mass and to penetrate the desktop market further. It would take a freaking miracle for some other fringe OS to penetrate it on the PC. The only way it would happen is for an OS to take over through the consumer device space first, where some huge company decides on the OS, and have people start using a settop box or media server as their PC too. The problem in the consumer device space is the application set is usually EXTREMELY limited and not under user control.
Somewhat beyond the public apathy what you are seeing at work here are forces that are inherent flaws in Capitalism, flaws that are deeply ingrained and very difficult to change.
The mechanisms that drive Capitalism never choose "the right thing", they always favor "the profitable thing". Sometimes "the right thing" and "the profitable thing" are "the same thing" but that is often not the case. The fact is the exploitation of fossil fuels did in fact drive some enormous advances in standard of living, technological progress, economic well being, and the entire structure of modern society is completely dependent on them at the moment. A few forward thinking people figured out the dangers of releasing all that sequestered CO2 back in to the atmosphere a long time ago, in particular Joseph Fourier(also the genius behind the Fourier Transform) and Svante Arrhenius, but most people didn't worry about it until now because the earth was so big and the profits so good. When we started we weren't burning a billion tons of coal a year.
Energy is essential to industrialized and information age living, its not easy to produce cheaply and on large scale, so you can't exactly fault the people who created our massive dependence on fossil fuels for doing what they did, and most of them saw enormous potential for benefit, and profit so they reaped it. That is just the way Capitalism works. We decimated most whale species because they were also a great and profitable source of energy in their day in the form of whale oil. The right thing was probably not to wipe out the oceans whales, but the profitable thing for a while said go for it.
To rant against whalers, big Tobacco or Big Oil is kind of howling at the moon. You are really just ranting at the unfortunate down side of Capitalism, and for better or worst it is the economic system almost our entire world is using now. Unless you opt for some kind of Socialism where government planners benevolently pick "the right thing" over "the profitable thing" you are going to have profit obsessed people do some really horrible things to each other and the earth as a whole. That is the way the system is designed. So far precedent indicates Socialist government planners are equally bad when it comes to doing "the right thing".
It is an interesting mental exercise to think about the pros and cons of global warming. The fact is our planet has had much warmer periods than the current one and it survived, and there were periods when much of that CO2 sequestered in fossil fuels was in fact in our atmosphere. Its not entirely bad that much of the Northern Hemisphere doesn't have the bitterly cold winters that were so common not very many years ago, and that vast new regions at the poles are now going to finally come out of the last ice age and become habitable.
The obvious problem is that, thanks to human ingenuity and excessive population growth, we are probably going to precipitate these changes much faster than either humans, or most animal and plant species can cope, and the consequences to all species will probably be dire. There is a little problem that we've built so much of our society at sea level. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and thanks to our short sightedness due to our short life spans and brief recorded history, we didn't realize that sea level has always fluctuated through the earth's history. If you are building cities to last, the current sea level and islands like Manhattan are actually not a good choice. Perhaps the native Americans who sold Manhattan island to the Europeans had a longer view of things and realized it really wasn't worth much, and sure wasn't a good place to build a town, much less a city.
This raises another interesting puzzle in economics. If global warming does happen and sea levels rise the economic consequences will be devastating because vast quantities of capital will go underwater. At some point burning fossil fuels will cease to be the profitable thing, at least for everything at sea level,
" 9/11 was a US governemnt plot with controlled demolition"
Controlled demolitions, WTF? If you are gonna do conspiracy theories at least try to start with PLAUSIBLE conspiracy theories. When you have video of the fact the towers were hit by hijacked jets loaded with fuel, burned profusely and the collapse started at the burning floors I think you can take it as a given the towers collapsed because hijacked planes were flown in to them,
If you want to hatch conspiracy theories it is entirely plausible that some nefarious intelligence agency penetrated some cell of Islamic radicals and directed them to launch this attack thinking they were doing it for Bin Laden. It would take some serious mental illness to justify initiating such an attack against your own country, to advance your political aims, so I would rate this as not a very plausible conspiracy theory.
A far more plausible conspiracy theory is some intelligence agency was well aware of the Al Qaida directed plot, before it happened, and the powers that be decided to look the other way because they saw the enormous potential in a new "Pearl Harbor" to allow them to:
A. dramatically expand their hold on power in the U.S. and justify repressive measures like the Patriot act and various domestic spying programs
B. to justify military adventures like the invasion of Iraq, which would NEVER have flown with the American people before 9/11. In a world of increasingly tight oil supplies dominating the Middle East militarily sure had to have some appeal to a bunch of oil men and the Saudi's were getting tired of hosting U.S. bases.
C. a great tool to win future elections
It is more than a little prescient that the neocon cabal behind The New American Century which includes Cheney and Rumsfeld had already openly extolled the virtues of a modern Pearl Harbor to futher their goals.
The precedent for this kind of conspiracy already exists. The U.S. basically did exactly this before the original Pearl Harbor. The U.S., Britain and the Dutch decided to embargo oil shipments to Japan to counter their aggressive war against China. The Japanese military and industrial complex was massively dependent on oil imports especially from Dutch and British oil fields in Indonesia. The embargo painted Japan in to a nasty corner, and their one way out without capitulation was to do exactly what they did, seize the oil fields in Indonesia, and while they were at it launch preemptive blows at the feeble British and American military assets in the Pacific in the hope they would capitulate.
During this period the American people and a lot if its political leaders were isolationist and had no interest in getting entangled in a second World War in Europe. Roosevelt rightly saw an enormous danger from Nazi Germany to Britain and eventually to the U.S. and he needed an excuse to drag the U.S. in to the war before Britain was invaded. Provoking an incident with Japan worked perfectly. Now perhaps Roosevelt and the U.S. military didn't know exactly where or when the attack would be but they KNEW a Japanese attack was almost inevitable, and they could guess at least some of it would be aimed at the Phillipines or the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii. It wasn't exactly an accident that the Navy was keeping its precious carriers at see so they weren't as vulnerable to attack. General Billy Mitchell had years earlier accurately and presciently outlined the plan for a Japanese torpedo attack against the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.
It is entirely plausible the Pearl Harbor on 12/7 and the one on 9/11 were not entirely unwelcome events to the Machiavellian powers that be.
"...so far off from Republican ideals, that it is not even funny. Republicans used to be the ones who were for a strong military, smaller government, less government intrusion into our lives and lower taxes"
Not sure how you really believed that this is what the Republican party every really stood for, "strong military" is mutually exclusive from "smaller government" and "less government intrusion into our lives". A strong military inherently drives up spending, and when coupled with its shadow intelligence agency twin has been the engine for "intrusion into our lives". Republicans have always been against intrusion by the government in "economic" life, because it hurts their profits, and they have always been against a big welfare state and they still are kind of. But, they have a pretty horrible and long running record on government assaults on civil liberties. Lincoln set some of the precedents for suspension of Habeas corpus and spying on Americans. He also helped institute the first income tax, and of course the the real issue at the root of the Civil War was the attempt by the Republicans to dramatically expand the power of the Federal government at the direct expense of the rights given to states by the Constitution. Our huge, excessively powerful Federal government really started there. The last time the Republicans controlled Congress we were blessed with McCarthyism, he was a Republican, who melded with the defense industrial complex in a long running witch hunt against Communists, both real and imagined, which was a huge "intrusion in to our lives". And of course Richard Nixon, a Republican shredded the Constitution, and was engaged in a massive spying campaign which "intruded in to our lives". There is a wing in the Republican party that is true conservative and for actual small government and civil liberties but they are seldom the ones that actually run thing.
The only really new thing about the new Republican party, since Reagan, is they seem to have completely abandoned any pretense of fiscal responsibility as they rush to cut taxes, and dramatically expand military spending. This is kind of new. The key problem is they can't, at the same time, gut Social Security, Medicate or Medicaid because they are wildly popular especially with a potent voting block, Senior citizens. If they could kill them, and still get elected they probably would but they can't. So what we have now is we have our cake and we eat it too, we have massive socialism, massive military expenditures and tax cutting at the same time, so we have massive deficits. We get away with it as long as the huge U.S. economy manages to keep its head above water. It has a lot of momentum from its past glory behind it though chances are it will eventually go under, since its not very competitive in a globalized world that has recovered from World War II finally. Soon it may get ugly. Sometime not so far down the road all the younger people have paid so much in to Social Security and Medicare will discover they are not going to be getting much of it back because it is all gone, while today's seniors who paid in so little will have reaped a windfall return before the goose stopped laying the golden egg. The other possibility is the U.S. might have to gut its military, but the defense industrial complex is REALLY powerful now, and really entrenched so I wouldn't bet against them.
"lower taxes are only for large corporations"
Well you make it sound like the grand old Republican party doesn't stand for this, well they have ALWAYS been the party of cutting corprate taxes, and taxes on the wealthy. It has been the one issue where they have been faultlessly consistent for a really long time.
"hat latter possibility would cause the value of the dollar on the world market to seriously drop, and that would create huge inflation here in the US. "
While true according to the Economics text books, that is probably a little simplistic.
The dollar has been tanking for a while and it hasn't really caused inflation. One reason being we buy so much of what we buy from China now, and China's yuan is pegged to the dollar, mostly by China buying dollars and treasuries. I think oil is also still sold on world markets in U.S. dollars so it doesn't really inflate as the dollar tanks, and oil exporters have an interest in keeping the dollar propped up since they get so many of them for their oil. There has been a desire in some oil rich nations to price oil in Euros but the U.S. has used numerous forms of pressure to prevent it, though I'm not sure quite how oil is bought and sold today.
Now China could start dumping dollars but it would cause the Yuan to spike. That WOULD cause inflation at Walmart, but it would also destroy the huge competitive advantage China now has in selling to their best customer. At least on the near term China has a big incentive to peg the Yuan, buy U.S. dollars, and bleed the U.S. white through trade deficits, not through economic warfare. Now someday the Chinese might want to stick a knife in the U.S., and they just might, especially at some point where they have eclipsed the U.S. in economic and military power, and finished bleeding the U.S. white. But right now really no rational country would want to take down the U.S. economy because as it goes down it could well take the rest of the world with it and everyone would suffer.
A tanking U.S. dollar actually improves America's competitive position in world trade exports, a factor in why both Reagan and Bush have let the dollar tank. Of course in the increasingly complex globalized world you also have a skilled or educated and hard working underpaid work force, crappy or no benefits for workers, and actually make things you can export for an undervalued currency to help you compete.
"But it wasn't worth what we've done to ourselves in the past few years."
.... twice. If George W. is opening your mail, listening on your phone or sending you or your kin to Iraq, well you shouldn't have voted for him, especially in 2004 when it was obvious what kind of man he was. If you voted for George W. and you now don't like him or the war in Iraq then you know what, tough, you got what you asked for.
There was a hilarious bit on ABC news tonight. Charlie Gibson was hammering some newly elected Democratic congressmen about the war on Iraq, the polls saying people wanted out of Iraq, that they got elected to get us out of Iraq, what is the Democrat's plan on Iraq, etc. One of the congresswomen replied she was inclined to support George W's plan to surge troops in to Iraq even though Gibson is saying its overwhelmingly contrary to the will of the people. Why? Because George W. is, for better or worse, the Commander in Chief, with the implication that he does in fact command the military, not Congress, and Congress did in fact give him a sweeping blank check to invade Iraq after 9/11 and do whatever else he thought necessary to prevent another 9/11. Her come back to Charlie Gibson which was wondrous, if the American people don't like what's happening in Iraq now they shouldn't have voted for George W. Bush
You see elections do have consequences. When tens of millions of Americans do something really stupid they should pay for it, and pay dearly. The people of Iraq certainly have, so should we. You see there is no good solution now in Iraq for the Democrats to throw on the table and they know it. All probable outcomes are bad in different ways. The only good strategy was to have not elected George W., or given him the blank check to go there in the first place. His dad knew full well that as bad as Saddam was, he was probably better than the alternatives, an Iran aligned Shia theocracy, Sunni's in open revolt against the Shia's, and a Kurdish state in the North seeking to gain control of Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iran that has a good chance of sparking a future war with Turkey.
For the last six years I've been deeply disturbed as the U.S. has running headlong to embrace an increasingly Fascist political party, but I'm equally disturbed now that the Democrats are back in control in Congress and everyone is thinking we've pulled back from the brink. You see the only thing that would have forced the American people to awake from their current coma of blissful ignorance, is for them to have to stare a real totalitarian government in the face and realize it was America's government, not one of some third world pisshole, and as in Nazi Germany they were the people that put it in power due to their own malice, avarice and stupidity. If Iraq hadn't gone south on the Bush administration they no doubt would have marched on to take down Syria and Iran, to dominate the Middle East and through the Middle East's oil the world. If Iraq hadn't gone south on them the Bush administration would probably have entrenched their control of the government, finished packing the Supreme court, and if they had been blessed with another 9/11 class event they would have REALLY dismantled the last bits of the Constitution and due process.
Iraq is in a lot of ways a bizarre mixed blessing. The quagmire in Iraq is probably the only thing that actually prevented the new hard right Republican party, from turning completely Fascist, and acquiring a stranglehold on power in the U.S. The American people should, in a way, be glad, that Katrina and Iraq went south on George W. so his party could no longer successfully manipulate the minds of mentally challenged people in to voting in to power people who are corrupt, power mad, paranoid, malevolent, manipulative and incompetent. Of course they end up electing Democrats and they are corrupt, power mad, paranoid, malevolent etc, they just go about it differently.
My fear is that now that we seemed to have pulled back from the brink,
"are clued up to the vastness/emptyness of space,..."
Uh, wrong. There are asteroids in reasonably close proximity to Earth which contain enough metals to satisfy our planets insatiable need for metals for basically ever. Why is this important? There was an interesting new law passed in the U.S.recently outlawing the melting down of U.S. coins? Why? Because at current copper and nickel demand, the price of the copper in a penny is now worth something like 1 and 3/4 cents and nickels are work 7-8 cents so you could make money just going to banks, demanding all of the coins you could get, melting them, and reselling the metal to a salvage yard which would probably ship it to China, as ballast in a container ship. Profit!!
Now it would be expensive to mine asteroids, but unless we A) contain our population growth, B) become much better at recycling precious resources or C) become adept at very deep mining we are going to start running out of things we depend on a lot like copper relatively soon. Faced with the finite resources of our planet the only other solution is for us to tap the resources in that space you thought was so empty.
Its not an imminent problem but it is a serious one. Earth is inherently a finite resource. Unless we learn to operate it in a sustainable, and limited manner...and Capitalism is notoriously bad at sustainable and limited... we will eventually be compelled to move in to space to find resources and living space. If we foolishly create a runaway greenhouse effect on this precious resource, Mars may be our only life boat as barran and painful as it would be.
It should also be noted that space is where a thing called the Sun is and it is the source of nearly all our energy, whether it be stored in fossil fuels, hydroelectric, wind or direct solar. We could tap directly in to a significant energy source by tapped solar power in space. The Sun is also probably depositing large quantities of deuterium and tritium on the surface of the Moon, something we need if we ever manage to do fusion power.
I'm the first to agree that NASA starting in about 1973, with the help of various Presidents. Congresses and corrupt contractors has done an amazing job of draining the last bit of enthusiasm for space exploration from everyone, but it is eventually something we will probably have to do, and the sooner we lay the foundation the better. Besides which now that we live on a planet with no frontiers left, space is the only place for adventurers to go and to find new frontiers. I pity a human race which has no pioneers.
I think America's failing enthusiasm for space exploration is a symptom more of an empire in steep decline. Americans are a lot more about self indulgence with their iPod cocoons, video games and obesity, so they've probably lost the ability or desire to do anything hard. The Chinese appear to still be VERY interested in space exploration, so if the U.S. doesn't do it they no doubt will. They are building huge reservoirs of Walmart's dollars to do it with, and they still teach the science, math and engineering to their young people so they have the tools to actually do it with.
The speech Kennedy game when he launched the Apollo program bears remembering:
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
Now you could probably do other important things that are hard, like solve our energy dilemma, global warming and population crisis too. But damn people, if you aren't gonna do things that are amazing and hard, you are a waste of precious space on this planet.
"Surely if Diebold can make a secure ATM there is no reason why it cannot make secure and reliable e-voting apparatus in which the public has confidence"
This is such a seriously foolish quote it stopped me from bothering to RTFA. ATM's and evoting machines are doing two completely different tasks, there are countless reasons a company can succeed at ATM's and not at evoting.
ATM's by definition retain and want no anonymity, while voting must retain anonymity or you risk tyrants and bureaucrats monitoring who people voted for and retaliating against or rewarding them. The need to insure anonymity vastly complicates the problem of also insuring integrity of the count. Evoting and internet voting advocates often dismiss the importance of anonymity as they pitch how convenient it would be to vote over the Internet. Voting over the Internet would be insane. Maybe anonymity is not so important....until people gain power who want to keep it by any means necessary, then anonymity is crucial. If people think their vote is being monitored they vote the way they think is safest, which is why dictators run sham elections where they get 99.9% of the vote. When people know their vote is being watched they vote for the dictator every time, unless they are suicidal.
ATM's are constantly audited by both the user and financial institution that runs them. If they recorded a false transaction the books wouldn't balance and either the bank or the customer would be instantly unhappy. The voter has absolutely no way to audit an all electronic system to insure it actually counted their vote as cast. If there were one it would almost certainly run afoul of the mandate for anonymity.
The only audit trail that is acceptable is the evoting machine produces a paper ballot the voter can check and which is the thing which is actually counted and even more importantly recounted. Thats how the evoting machines where I vote work, they just produce a paper ballot that is checkable by the voter, you can fill the same ballot out by hand, they go to an optical scanner to be counted and they can be recounted by hand if necessary. With this approach the evoting machines are mostly a very expensive convenience and are really not worth the money being spent on them for the average voter.
If there was an ounce of sanity in this country evoting machines would have been confined to a couple machines in each precinct specifically for the needs of disabled voters, which would help them produce a paper ballot without requiring someone to help them and meddle in how they vote. Unfortunately in the wake of the 2000 debacle, large amounts of federal money were dangled in the front of greedy Republican friendly companies like Diebold and ESS and they are now vast numbers of enormously expensive machines in precincts across the country. Beyond the subsidized initial expense the maintenance costs are enormous, since once you buy a system you are locked in to that vendor and their support contract. The logisitics of deploying them are also expensive, extremely prone to failure, and frequently overwhelm the civil servants and poll volunteers who have to deal with them. Elections are something which occurs once a year or every two years. Creating this enormously expensive technological infrastructure for something that occurs infrequently is insane, It is mostly designed to enrich the companies that feed off it, and that was true of all the mechanical systems which predate evoting, its just worse with computers in the mix.
The only small case you can make for evoting is it prevents people from making mistakes like voting for two candidates in a race. Sorry but if you screw up your ballot its your fault your vote will be disqualified.
Voting really is something best left to people marking paper ballots with pens, and then counting them by hand or maybe an optical scanner if you want to be real high tech, and then ALWAYS with MANDATORY hand counts of random precincts to insure the system is on the up and up. This really isn't the rocket science we've turned it in to.
Not sure you can really trust Wikipedia to be a definitive source on controversial issues especially relating to Israel. They have had some serious problems with people with political agendas altering their articles on controversial topics relating to Israel, for example the article on the controversial massacre at Deir Yassin. There were times I've gone back to that article and its been completely rewritten from a pro Israeli perspective downplaying any suggestion of a massacre there, other times its fairly balanced othertimes its somewhat pro Arab. Wikipedia does great on factual topics, its horrible on controversial political ones.
It might have been a bit of an overstatement by the grandparent to say Iraq was entirely due to pressure from the pro Israeli lobby, but you are just as wrong to say there was no influence from there. Joe Lieberman is a poster boy for the pro Israel lobby and he was, and still is, one of the biggest cheerleaders of that foolish war, if anyone deserved to get thrown out of office over it was him, but oh well. Its just as true that Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle were prime movers within the DOD to make the case for it and they are rabidly pro Israel, and leading members of the pro Israel lobby. In fact most of the Straussian neoconservatives who pushed this foolish war on the U.S. are Jewish and rabidly pro Israel. William Kristol, Fox News mouth piece for the Straussian neocons, is another member of the pro Israel neocon cabal that pushed us in to the war.
Trying to say that the pro Israel lobby didn't help push us in to Iraq is just simply not true. I wager both they and Israel are regretting at this point since they are now a facing a failed state in Iraq and the rise of a pro Iranian Shia theocracy there, and an emboldened Iran and Hezzbolah that is probably more of a threat to them than the boxed in Saddam was.
"Having Rumsfeld step down weeks ago would have validated Democrat "
Probably true if it had happened out of the blue. If all the Republican Congressional candidates had gotten together en masse and demanded Rumsfeld's resignation a couple months ago, Bush had actually done it, and they'd gotten someone like McCain in there it could have probably been a huge net plus for the Republicans and could have turned the election. It would have shown the President as breaking out of his bubble and listening to the people's representatives in his party, and taking a new tack on Iraq instead of just staying the course and slowing throwing American soldiers and dollars in to a never ending meat grinder. Of course McCain is likely to increase the troop strength in Iraq not decrease it and no telling how that would play with Americans especially if you had to start a draft to get the cannon fodder.
A few congressional candidates did demand Rummy's resignation at the last minute when they realized they were in serious trouble over Iraq but it was to little to late and just looked like a cheap political tactic to save their skins.
It was just beyond bizarre for Bush to pat Dick and Don on the back right before the election and say they were going to be there for the duration of his second term. I can't seriously believe he had really decided to get rid of him at that point. It makes him look either deceitful, foolish or both.
For people who used to be pretty politically astute they seemed to have developed a real tin political ear. Maybe they never really had a good ear, they just noticed the Democrats suched and they could ride 9/11 and and gay bashing to victory for a while. Rumsfeld and Cheney are popular with almost no one at this point, Democrats or Republicans. The only people still in their court are the rabid pro Israeli lobby, like Lieberman, who got us in to this mess in the first place. At this point Israel and Iran are about the only two places where there are still people who still like the war in Iraq, Israel because it got rid of one of the two biggest threats on their borders, one who shot missiles at them, and Iran because it appears they will be the big winner of this foolish war in the end. I wager even Israel will regret the whole thing when an Iranian friendly Shia theocracy is in full bloom in Iraq. Turkey will also be royally pissed when Northern Iraq turns in to an independent Kurdistan and tries to seize the Kurdish regions of Turkey.
"The real threat to democracy is people who don't really care about what's going on in government."
That is part of the problem but the real basis of the problem is we've settled in to an entrenched two party system. Those two parties have established a complete strangehold on the electoral process and as long as they are both equally bad they get away with it, they can just ping pong power between each other while the country heads in to the dumper.
For example:
- The 2 parties have used numerous methods to block the formation of a viable 3rd party with a chance to win, in many states by placing huge burdens on 3rd parties to just get on the ballot, and of course most 3rd parties have been dominated by fringe candidates and supporters that just don't have the staying power or wide enough appeal to win. The media compounds the problem by painting anyone not Republican or Democrat as a nut and a novelty depriving them of legitimacy in the minds of voters. So we have a system in which both parties are bad and they have no incentive to improve because the competition isn't any better and there is no viable 3rd choice.
- Many states completely disenfranchise independent voters since they can't vote in primaries. This means the Democrats and the Republicans pick the two choices and independents hold their nose and pick the worst of the two. Independents have no say in the process of picking good candidates and even in the states they can vote in the primary they are just spoilers or king makers of the two party's candidates. You want to shake up the system, make it law that independents have their own primary and can nominate their own candidate. If you got good sensible, non extremist candidates running and independents put good people on the ballot, people may well start leaving the two parties in droves for independency. Many people now hate both parties with a passion but feel locked in to them because if they go independent they are largely disenfranchised. I often wonder if our political system might actually work better if there were no party affiliations and no party line votes either on ballots or on legislation. You get elected on merit and ideas and not on party affiliation. Legislation gets passed if it is sound and garners enough support, not because one party wants to shove their polarizing agenda through. Maybe less legislation would get passed but that would probably be an improvement too.
- The 2 parties, when they gain control of state legislatures, have completely gerrymandered every congressional district to insure they will win in an as many districts as possible, i.e. put all the minorities in one contorted urban district where a minority candidate wins but the Republicans get a lock on 2-3 seats in the suburbs as a result. Gerrymandering is probably the single most corrosive force working against Democracy today, since it promotes candidates on the extremes who pander to their rigged base consituency. Also as long as they get their parties nomination there is a low chance of them every getting voted out so they have no accountability to their constituents. You want to fix the House, come up with a color blind algorithm to create house districts somewhat randomly and based on simple geometry and geography, and hopefully make more districts competitive and diverse. The challenge is to not completely deprive minorties of representation in the process.
A final problem is the simple fact really good smart people don't usually run for office any more, if they ever did. Their simply aren't any great statesman anymore. The people who run are nearly universally bad people, they are manipulative opportunists, not people who want to pass sound laws and work for the betterment of their country. If good people do run the manipulative opportunists beat them. Getting elected sucks, especially getting on your knees for campaign contributions, the pay sucks(until you leave and turn in to a lobbyist), the scrutiny of your life sucks, and when you get in office y
Granted it is quite possible these were just a few cases of machines being messed up, and should be no cause for alarm. But you know what, it COULD be a cause for alarm and your attempt to dismiss it is just as bad if not worse than the people who are trying to hype this in to a conspiracy. It COULD be an attempt to rig the election. The fact is there have been seriously irregularities in 2000, 2002, 2004 and will probably be again this year and people keep just downplaying them like you just did, and the potential for abuse is getting worse each election.
For some reason Americans have the enormous capacity to disbelieve anyone would steal one of their elections. I hate to break it to you but election rigging is widespread throughout history and throughout the world. It has happened in the U.S. before, in Kennedy-Nixon in 1960 in Kennedy's favor and again in Florida in 2000 to favor the Governor's brother. If there was ever an election that was going to be stolen its this one, because the party in power is in serious trouble, they are drunk on their power and they have this righteous self delusion that they are the only ones capable of governing. Those are the kind of people who do rig elections and still sleep at night.
I hate to break it to you but if these machines needed to be recalibrated multiple times during the course of the election they are fundamentally flawed and should be thrown out. It would be relative easy for someone to figure out that they could improperly calibrate a percentage of the machines in one parties favor and manipulate an election, and if anyone notices they just say what you just said.
The fact is all voting systems have a margin of error, but these electronic systems have a staggeringly high margin for error, and even worse potential for intentional abuse especially all the ones that have no paper trail for a proper recount. I think going back to paper ballots with X's on them and teams of little old ladies counting them would be just wondeful, thank you.
The other damning thing about electronic voting is they are a massive drain on the resources of the local governments deploying them, and our Federal tax dollars. They are proving to be ENORMOUSLY expensive to maintain, often timea 10X what was promised. Once a local governmet picks one and buys them they are at the complete mercy of a near monopoly that can often charge as much as they feel like to keep them working from now on.
Our motto for evoting machines, just like most of our politicians, should be THROW THE BUMS OUT.
P.S.
Not sure the Republican's need to rig the election since they pulled out their secret weapon. Mr Skull and Bones himself, John Kerry. John could you please keep your stupid ass mouth shut, or better yet join the Republican party. You are the single greatest weapon in th Republican campaign to inflict Fascism on us. I, as have most people, have had enough of you, because you are a completely clueless preppy rich kid, just like the ahole sitting in the White House. How the hell did you make as far as you have in politics when you can't seem to open your mouth without saying something stupid.
" China and India, the two most populus countries in the world, had high population growth, but now that their economy has dramatically improved their birth rates are dropping."
Do you actually have a reference to support this or did you pluck it out of your....
The one reference I found in a quick Google search indicated one of the first declines in Chinese population growth occurred in the 70's when they were still Communist and before the boom and was largely due to social engineering efforts by the government. They've also implemented a relatively brutal one child per family policy for a number of years which if it worked would be the main reason for population decline, though the study I read suggested it really hadn't worked that well because the rural poor were defying it at every turn.
The economic booms in China and India are confined to relatively small regions and populations in both and I seriously doubt they are having a dramatic impact on their overall population growth yet. A big majority in both countries are still rural and poor and are seeing little benefit from the booms in a few booming regions.
Actually your analogy is the only thing that sounds ridiculous. Hummers are a luxury. Having children is an essential biological process necessary for preservation of your species and genetic material. A spouse and children are a really valuable thing to have when you age or have a serious illness because they will hopefully take care of you versus dumping you on the mercies of strangers in public health care. Its not as true as it was but children also propagate some continuity in wealth creation, especially in home ownership, farms and small business.
As you grow older I think you might realize that having no children means your life has substantially less meaning than if you have a couple well raised children. It fosters continuity and stability which is why governments like marriage and children so much.
I wont dispute there is a lot of validity in your point that people having a LOT of children, and getting government subsidies for it is probably a net negative, but it is an extremely desirable part of societal well being for people to have one or two children so tax breaks aren't an unreasonable thing for that. Its kind of an unfortunate fact of life that capitalism, nationalism and militarism thrives on population growth so governments routinely strive to fuel it, until it reaches the point overpopulation becomes a net negative as it has in India and China.
"neither hetero nor homo couples get any preferrential treatment over singles. Screw government interference)."
I agree wholeheartedly, but its probably not realistic to expect social engineering by government to stop anytime soon. There are deeply ingrained biological, political, religious, economic and social compulsions to promote the stereotypical "family". If everyone stops having children and raising them properly then social structure collapse. As most developed nations have instituted massive social safety nets for seniors, and as life expectency has dramatically increased there is a social compulsion to make sure people breed more so there are enough young people to bleed white to support seniors who are often living 20-30 years past retirement and are receiving extensive and expensive medical care. Affluence and education actually leads people to have fewer children which is bad, while the poor and uneducated produce ever more kids, so politicians are obsessed with stepping in.
Japan is currently in the forefront of developed countries with declining population and a huge economic and social problem providing a safety net for its seniors. There are only three solutions, cut benefits to seniors and threaten their quality of life or survival, jack up taxes and bleed the young ever more which hammers economic growth or try to engineer the production of more children through things like tax incentives.
In a massively overpopulated planet it would be extremely desirable if we actually did have a big population contraction. Unfortunately population IS contracting among the affluent and well educated and still exploding in the 3rd world among the poor and uneducated which is bad.
So the bottomline is there is are a host of reasons why government in developed countries engage in social engineering favoring the married with children occurs and is unlikely to ever stop. Religious bias among politicians also compels them to promote the Adam and Eve family.
Tax breaks also win votes from the married with children crowd who are probably more likely to vote than partying singles. It is also a fact that raising children is expensive and is a big financial burden on families that singles don't have and they can use some help.
There are a lot of days when I really don't appreciate paying to educate someone else's juvenile delinquents especially when that education is so horrible in the U.S. and is doing such an incredibly poor job with the most gifted kids. The "No Child Left Behind" obsession with the least able students is pure insanity for social well being. We should be pouring maximum resources in the most talented students to insure they get world class education and encouraging the least able in to vocational education where they can find skills suited to their abilities. In reality I think "No Child Left Behind" was more focused on compelling all kids to develop the basic skills necessary for military server and to give military recruiters unlimited access to young children to try to maximize the supply of cannon fodder without instituting a draft. I really think "No Child Left Behind" is really militarism posing as education and is seriously biased to getting the least gifted students prepped for enlisted duty in the military.
"Only 403 people renounced U.S. citizensip in 2002"
Thought I should it will be very interesting to see if this number starts spiking soon. It usually takes years to establish new citizenship and renounce your old one, so we probably wont know until we see numbers in 2006-2010 how many people have opted to flee the insanity that is the new Fasco-Republican party.
"The passport is nothing more than the evolution of the Lord's Chit"
This is probably the most insightful comment on this topic so far. Its the simple answer as to why more people haven't left the U.S. as its tilted to Fascism.
The fact is it is pretty hard to emigrate from the U.S., renounce your citizenship, and the process creates such high barriers most people wont run the gauntlet unless they are desperate. Most people instead opt to sit and wait and hope the country comes to its senses some day. Never underestimate the stupidity of American voters though, or the ability of the malevolent powers that be to manipulate them in to doing stupid things using fear mongering, propaganda and wedge issues.
Only 403 people renounced U.S. citizensip in 2002 and most were people who had immigrated to the U.S. and decided to return to their homeland.
Here is a somewhat humorous and sad article on why its a pain to kiss your U.S. citizenship goodbye. When this article was written there were still a few Caribbean islands selling citizenships for dollars but the U.S. has been using political and economic pressure to shut them down mostly to prevent wealthy Americans from escaping U.S. taxes.
Fact is, as long as you are a U.S. citizen you are owned by the U.S. government and you can't escape that fact unless you consent to be owned by some other country, it usually takes years to do that, you cant have a criminal record or HIV, and you usually have to clear years worth of hurdles that are usually more painful than just staying where you are and hope things get better. If you ever commit a crime, even a relatively minor one like drug offenses, you are pretty much enslaved to the U.S. because chances are no one else will take you unless you are rich enough to grease some palms or willing to be an illegal alien.
If you still choose to emigrate note you have to file IRS tax returns every year until you renounce citizenship, and hope tax treaties keep you from getting taxed in both your new home and the old one. The IRS may not leave you alone even after you renounce if they think some of your wealth belong to them.
You also cant legally emigrate or renounce your citizenship to escape military service. So if you joined the military before 9/11 to get that college education and not to fight an ugly illegal war in Iraq you are stuck until Uncle Sam lets you go. If the draft comes back you also wont be able to emigrate to escape it. It could be political suicide for whomever institutes a draft, but it could well happen since Uncle Sam will need more cannon fodder if Iraq continues to go south, and the U.S. opts to "Stay the Course", or if places like Iran or North Korea go south too. The U.S. barely has the cannon fodder for the current wars, fewer people want to volunteer, so if they need many more targets at all the draft will be back.
So it usually takes years, is usually not easy, and you wont be free of Uncle Sam until you've succeeded in gaining citizenship elsewhere and renounced U.S. citizenship. During this multi year process a myriad of things can go wrong that derail the whole process, a minor scrap with the law in your new home, can torpedo the whole process for example. Somewhere during the process, or worse right after you renounce your U.S. citizenship, the U.S. could come to its senses, elect a moderate sensible government, while your new home could go off the political deep end. Take comfort that the chances the U.S. will elect a moderate, sensible government look to be pretty low lately.
Unless you are attempting refugee status, and no country is going to given an American refugee status, chances are you need to be either very affluent or you are going to need a company to sponsor and employ you. If you have a nice employer and a job you like this isn't so bad, but there is a wicked catch. Your residence in your new country is often almost completely dependent on that employer, they know
"For the first time (as far as we can tell) there is a species on Earth that is developing the technology to avert future mass extinctions and violent climate change"
We haven't developed ANYTHING to do what you are absent mindedly dreaming of, nor are we likely to until there is PROFIT in it and there isn't much profit in it at present. Our technological advances are fueling violent climate change and species extinction not preventing it. The only thing we have on your list is we are tracking asteroids so we MIGHT spot one that will be a planet killer, and we might spot it in time to do something about it, but we are sorely lacking in any means to do it nor are we making any effort to develop it. Again no profit in it until we are staring a planet killer in the face, and we may not see one of those for millions of years. We have zero capacity to do anything about a killer volcanoes and earthquakes and probably never will. Maybe we will develop clean, renewable, plentiful power sources but at present those making a fortune off fossil fuels have been extremely successful in obstructing the development of better alternatives.
I don't think I would be conning myself that traveling to other galaxies, or even another star will solve our problems. I doubt we will even make it to another planet in a sustainable way before our species exterminates itself. I think you've been watching a little to much Star Trek. I had similar delusions when I was a kid. Gee how romantic space travel would be and how it would solve all our problems. Get real dude, there is value in having dreams and aspiring to do hard things, but not to the point you stop dealing with realities of here and now.
The simple truth is that at present the planet Earth is the only biosphere we have and even know of that works for us and offers us a pleasant life. We should be doing everything in our power to keep it in one piece and keep it operating on a sustainable level instead of thinking if we screw it up we will just hop in the Enterprise and head to a new one. We are struggling to just get to back to the moon, and its a simple fact that compared to Earth every other planetary body in our solar systems absolutely sucks by comparison and there is no telling if there any or many other biospheres nearby that are even close. I assure you trying to survive on the Moon or Mars will be a purely miserable experience by comparison, nor are we likely to make it to even our nearest stellar neighbor in centuries. Now maybe mining asteroids or generating power in space will help us solve some of our problems, if so hurrah but I wouldn't count on it because it will be enormously hard.