What individuals? Most of these companies are not directly held by shareholders, but by various kinds of investment groups and institutional investors? If that's a democracy, then it's an absolutely horrible kind, rather like voting for the guy that votes for the guy who votes for thehttp://news.slashdot.org/story/11/10/24/1542240/the-147-corporations-controlling-most-of-the-global-economy# guy who votes for the guy who makes the decisions.
If someone is getting filthy rich by corrupting the political system and through financial trickery to game the system in their favor, that doesn't strike me as the same thing as making your wealth via the sweat of your hands. The problem is that a good portion of those at the top of the food chain are not making their vast wealth via the poetic "sweat of the brow" that is such a big part of the American mythos, but are doing it by cheating and stealing, and buying off the political classes, or at the very least overawing them with notions of "too big to fail."
At some point big money and liberty will inevitably collide, and by basically just jumping over the issue by making believe that a fair number of the most extremely wealthy are in fact making that wealth through nefarious means, you're allowing ideology to lead you by the nose, straight into the abyss.
In the olden days, it was recognized that there was were aristocratic and noble classes, and from there could stem some degree of control. The West, by essentially eradicating those classes, has basically allowed them to be recreated, but now philosophically and ideologically seems incapable of applying the same rules that once applied. The idea of noblesse oblige, at least created an underlying idea that those of wealth and privilege owed the lower classes something for their labors, even if it was frequently ignored.
Now essentially we have an aristocracy built on pure greed, that speaks the language of economic egalitarianism, in fact feel themselves quite independent of society. They have encouraged economic and social libertarianism simply because it improves their bottom line. It is essentially a sociopathic aristocracy, and just how long do you think that can go on? At some, as the French Revolution showed, you'll break too many backs, and all these quaint notions of economic and social liberty, of getting rich the old-fashioned way, and offering empty platitudes like "in American you can be whatever you work to accomplish" will no longer sell. Do you think the West has become invulnerable to class warfare?
Right now, it's just crazy hippies and college students bitching about Wall Street. But if there isn't found a way to wrest some political control from the new aristocracy, it will get ugly, and then we'll end up with an awful system like Communism that nobody wants.
The world is a better place because of Winston Churchill, Florence Nightingale and Aristotle. Steve Jobs was a very successful marketing guy. He didn't save the world or create new ways to explain it, he ran a company who makes electronic doo-dads who, by and large, are totally reliant on technologies made by other people.
Burn it, bury it, put a stake through it's heart. The tape is probably like that girl from The Ring, and if you watch it, the undead ghost of Steve Jobs will come and jam your Android device into your brain.
I think California is as good an example as to how bad direct democracy can become. Simply put, I don't really think you can run anything beyond a small city on direct democracy before it starts to have serious, deleterious effects.
But this is a false dilemma. These scientists are by and large funded directly or indirectly by governments that would be far better off if cheap energy could be produced. At any rate, what you're saying isn't that they're research is colored, but rather that they are committing fraud to get grant money. You are making the most profoundly damaging accusation against a rather large number of researchers.
And to what? To defend a very small number of researchers (excluding all the engineers, journalists and other non-experts) who we can demonstrate have an agenda.
Again, I put my post back to you. We're talking about one of the most highly populated areas of the United States, one that is critical to its economic wellbeing, as well as have a lot of US citizens.
There is no profit in monitoring seismic activity of fault lines. There's no profit in maintaining a constant watch on outgassing of volcanoes. There's little enough profit in keeping banks of offshore sensors watching for seismic activity in the Pacific Rim to predict potentially lethal tsunamis. And yet, what purpose could a nation state ever have but at the most basic level to pool resources to allow such activities, often quite expensive, to be carried out.
Do you actually think the electorate of the west coast of the United States would let Libertarians like you strip away those protections? In a million years can you ever imagine what would happen to Ron Paul, if, on the incredibly small chance that he ever became President, attempted to dismantle the USGS's monitoring along the Pacific coast, or NOAA's satellite and radar monitoring in the Pacific and Atlantic? Congress would cut him off at the knees, because he would be chief of the Executive, not a king who can just unilaterally cut the Federal Government to ribbons at his pleasure.
What Ron Paul suggests would threaten millions of lives, would anger large portions of the population, and would scare other parts of the population, who while perhaps not receiving the direct benefits, would know they would be next in this bizarre dash to turn the Federal Government into some pre-Civil War shell.
Lincoln won, the United States is not the Republic it was in the beginning. Get over it.
Indeed. It strikes me that simply signing an IOU and then immediately paying it ought to take care of the direct cash payment angle. Just make sure you save the IOU along with any invoices and other source documents, and I don't think there's anything the state could do about it.
So the long and short of it is that you're trying to say depopulating southern California, much of Oregon and Washington state is what's really needed here. Wouldn't want the Feds encouraging anyone to live there.
Posts like that make me hope the poster gets a really horrific disease that doesn't kill him right away, but makes him linger. I wouldn't cross the street to piss on that poster if he was on fire.
I think people would look back fondly on this period as an era of cooperation and goodwill between the White House and Congress if Ron Paul became the next president.
And, in fact, where you basically have to shoehorn it into another department (NOAA in defense?), you're probably going to produce a vast number of inefficiencies as unlike organizations have to try to figure out how to talk to one another, and where the parent department has a mission statement that tilts in one direction now either has to accommodate one that tilts the other way, or simply force it to their direction.
Well, more likely Congress would simply refuse to cooperate. I've long said it, that if Ron Paul were president, he'd be spending a lonely four years in the White House with a Congress that would refuse to work with him. It's not like most of what he proposes he can actually do anyways. To dismantle those departments would require Congressional approval. Do you think, for instance, that all those Congresscritters from California up to Washington State would ever stand by and let the USGS be killed or farmed out? Do you think all those Congresscritters along the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Seaboard would actually go along with wiping out NOAA?
You are aware, I trust, that the USGS is responsible for a large number of monitoring programs. Basically, killing it would essentially leave the West Coast of the United States without tsunami, earthquake or volcano alerts. I'm sure the people that live along that very geologically active strip of turf will be happy to know that Ron Paul considers them essentially expendable in his quest for ideological purity.
I think it's reached the point where she needs to come out as a lesbian, you know, after agonizing over it for weeks. Then she'd at least get a spot on Ellen.
I doubt the EU would look so kindly on such a deal, so I think the days of Microsoft using its market clout with Windows/Exchange is probably dead. Besides, how exactly would a deal with Apple help Windows phone sales?
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What individuals? Most of these companies are not directly held by shareholders, but by various kinds of investment groups and institutional investors? If that's a democracy, then it's an absolutely horrible kind, rather like voting for the guy that votes for the guy who votes for thehttp://news.slashdot.org/story/11/10/24/1542240/the-147-corporations-controlling-most-of-the-global-economy# guy who votes for the guy who makes the decisions.
If someone is getting filthy rich by corrupting the political system and through financial trickery to game the system in their favor, that doesn't strike me as the same thing as making your wealth via the sweat of your hands. The problem is that a good portion of those at the top of the food chain are not making their vast wealth via the poetic "sweat of the brow" that is such a big part of the American mythos, but are doing it by cheating and stealing, and buying off the political classes, or at the very least overawing them with notions of "too big to fail."
At some point big money and liberty will inevitably collide, and by basically just jumping over the issue by making believe that a fair number of the most extremely wealthy are in fact making that wealth through nefarious means, you're allowing ideology to lead you by the nose, straight into the abyss.
In the olden days, it was recognized that there was were aristocratic and noble classes, and from there could stem some degree of control. The West, by essentially eradicating those classes, has basically allowed them to be recreated, but now philosophically and ideologically seems incapable of applying the same rules that once applied. The idea of noblesse oblige, at least created an underlying idea that those of wealth and privilege owed the lower classes something for their labors, even if it was frequently ignored.
Now essentially we have an aristocracy built on pure greed, that speaks the language of economic egalitarianism, in fact feel themselves quite independent of society. They have encouraged economic and social libertarianism simply because it improves their bottom line. It is essentially a sociopathic aristocracy, and just how long do you think that can go on? At some, as the French Revolution showed, you'll break too many backs, and all these quaint notions of economic and social liberty, of getting rich the old-fashioned way, and offering empty platitudes like "in American you can be whatever you work to accomplish" will no longer sell. Do you think the West has become invulnerable to class warfare?
Right now, it's just crazy hippies and college students bitching about Wall Street. But if there isn't found a way to wrest some political control from the new aristocracy, it will get ugly, and then we'll end up with an awful system like Communism that nobody wants.
The world is a better place because of Winston Churchill, Florence Nightingale and Aristotle. Steve Jobs was a very successful marketing guy. He didn't save the world or create new ways to explain it, he ran a company who makes electronic doo-dads who, by and large, are totally reliant on technologies made by other people.
Burn it, bury it, put a stake through it's heart. The tape is probably like that girl from The Ring, and if you watch it, the undead ghost of Steve Jobs will come and jam your Android device into your brain.
Godzilla?
I think California is as good an example as to how bad direct democracy can become. Simply put, I don't really think you can run anything beyond a small city on direct democracy before it starts to have serious, deleterious effects.
That way, we can vote to have Socrates drink hemlock tea!
And you have evidence to back up this chain of fraud, right?
But this is a false dilemma. These scientists are by and large funded directly or indirectly by governments that would be far better off if cheap energy could be produced. At any rate, what you're saying isn't that they're research is colored, but rather that they are committing fraud to get grant money. You are making the most profoundly damaging accusation against a rather large number of researchers.
And to what? To defend a very small number of researchers (excluding all the engineers, journalists and other non-experts) who we can demonstrate have an agenda.
In other words you're cherry picking your experts. You're committing a classic example of the No True Scotsman fallacy.
Again, I put my post back to you. We're talking about one of the most highly populated areas of the United States, one that is critical to its economic wellbeing, as well as have a lot of US citizens.
There is no profit in monitoring seismic activity of fault lines. There's no profit in maintaining a constant watch on outgassing of volcanoes. There's little enough profit in keeping banks of offshore sensors watching for seismic activity in the Pacific Rim to predict potentially lethal tsunamis. And yet, what purpose could a nation state ever have but at the most basic level to pool resources to allow such activities, often quite expensive, to be carried out.
Do you actually think the electorate of the west coast of the United States would let Libertarians like you strip away those protections? In a million years can you ever imagine what would happen to Ron Paul, if, on the incredibly small chance that he ever became President, attempted to dismantle the USGS's monitoring along the Pacific coast, or NOAA's satellite and radar monitoring in the Pacific and Atlantic? Congress would cut him off at the knees, because he would be chief of the Executive, not a king who can just unilaterally cut the Federal Government to ribbons at his pleasure.
What Ron Paul suggests would threaten millions of lives, would anger large portions of the population, and would scare other parts of the population, who while perhaps not receiving the direct benefits, would know they would be next in this bizarre dash to turn the Federal Government into some pre-Civil War shell.
Lincoln won, the United States is not the Republic it was in the beginning. Get over it.
Indeed. It strikes me that simply signing an IOU and then immediately paying it ought to take care of the direct cash payment angle. Just make sure you save the IOU along with any invoices and other source documents, and I don't think there's anything the state could do about it.
So the long and short of it is that you're trying to say depopulating southern California, much of Oregon and Washington state is what's really needed here. Wouldn't want the Feds encouraging anyone to live there.
Posts like that make me hope the poster gets a really horrific disease that doesn't kill him right away, but makes him linger. I wouldn't cross the street to piss on that poster if he was on fire.
I think people would look back fondly on this period as an era of cooperation and goodwill between the White House and Congress if Ron Paul became the next president.
And, in fact, where you basically have to shoehorn it into another department (NOAA in defense?), you're probably going to produce a vast number of inefficiencies as unlike organizations have to try to figure out how to talk to one another, and where the parent department has a mission statement that tilts in one direction now either has to accommodate one that tilts the other way, or simply force it to their direction.
Well, more likely Congress would simply refuse to cooperate. I've long said it, that if Ron Paul were president, he'd be spending a lonely four years in the White House with a Congress that would refuse to work with him. It's not like most of what he proposes he can actually do anyways. To dismantle those departments would require Congressional approval. Do you think, for instance, that all those Congresscritters from California up to Washington State would ever stand by and let the USGS be killed or farmed out? Do you think all those Congresscritters along the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Seaboard would actually go along with wiping out NOAA?
This is a guy who seems to think Abraham Lincoln was a bigger criminal than Jefferson Davis.
And who exactly is going to pay for the satellites and the scientists? Do you actually know what NOAA does?
It does bring out all the sociopaths and morons who are his supporters
You are aware, I trust, that the USGS is responsible for a large number of monitoring programs. Basically, killing it would essentially leave the West Coast of the United States without tsunami, earthquake or volcano alerts. I'm sure the people that live along that very geologically active strip of turf will be happy to know that Ron Paul considers them essentially expendable in his quest for ideological purity.
So people would have to pay to find out if a hurricane is going to nail them?
Ah America, land where sociopathic greed is not only approved of, but actually encouraged.
I'm not clear here. What private corporation is going to do what the US Geological Survey does?
I think it's reached the point where she needs to come out as a lesbian, you know, after agonizing over it for weeks. Then she'd at least get a spot on Ellen.
I doubt the EU would look so kindly on such a deal, so I think the days of Microsoft using its market clout with Windows/Exchange is probably dead. Besides, how exactly would a deal with Apple help Windows phone sales?