What really sets some people off is the fact that a CEO who has mismanaged some corporation into losing billions of dollars is rewarded with a severance package worth millions.
Think about it. If the CEO’s decisions are costing the company billions, it is a bargain to get him out the door immediately for millions, rather than having his departure delayed by either internal struggles or battles in the courts.
UPDATE: Now that I think about it, the USA would save enormous amounts of money, and be obviously better governed, if every single member of congress was offered 10 million dollars simply to leave. Cost: a mere 5.35 billion. Practically nothing. Only small change in comparison just to the pork in every year, yet alone the money wasted to the efforts of lobbyists and special interests, and the money spent in straightforward vote buying with entitlements.
One thing you’d know about the congress critters who stayed… either they’d be the very honest ones, or the ones already making more than 10 million per term in less scrupulous ways. So we’d have only the honest, or the very competent (scarily so), but at least we’d get rid of the weak minded dopes. Think of it as funded term limits.
My dictionary defines “moderator” as “the nonpartisan presiding officer of a town meeting.” On Thursday, PBS anchor Gwen Ifill will serve as moderator for the first and only vice presidential debate. The stakes are high. The Commission on Presidential Debates, with the assent of the two campaigns, decided not to impose any guidelines on her duties or questions.
But there is nothing “moderate” about where Ifill stands on Barack Obama. She’s so far in the tank for the Democratic presidential candidate, her oxygen delivery line is running out.
In an imaginary world where liberal journalists are held to the same standards as everyone else, Ifill would be required to make a full disclosure at the start of the debate. She would be required to turn to the cameras and tell the national audience that she has a book coming out on Jan. 20, 2009 — a date that just happens to coincide with the inauguration of the next president of the United States.
The title of Ifill’s book? “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.” Nonpartisan my foot.
Contrast time: McCain put his prestige on the line, and went and worked, out front, for the bill, even at some risk to his campaign. Obama just hung back to see how the wind would blow, while talking the talk in campaign stops.
Russia’s economic prospects were looking up when the price of oil was in continuous ascent. But it’s stock exchange has lost enormous amounts in the last year or so. Which suggests a new strategy: instead of MAD (mutually assured destruction), the old Cold War stalemate, we should try MESS (mutual economic strategic starvation). We have more food than they do. Let’s destroy their economy by merely crippling ours. Maybe that’s the reason for the inexplicable congressional inertia for the last few years regarding Fannie and Freddie. It’s all part of the conspiracy to beggar Russia.
Russian stock indexes sank Tuesday despite the federal market regulator ordering a two-hour trading halt in anticipation of massive fallout from the rejection of a bank bailout in the U.S. Congress.
It sort of gives a new meaning to starving your enemy into submission.
The next U.S. president, John McCain or Barack Obama, is expected to be a penny-pinching commander in chief when it comes to buying new military weapons. And that’s bad news for the Air Force’s push to buy scores more F-22 Raptors, a supersonic jet fighter built to dominate enemy airspace.
Putin probably planted the article…. which doesn’t mean it won’t be true, especially if we still have a Democrat Congress.
Personally, I’d rather own an F-35 VTOL craft; better commuter vehicle, doesn’t need a landing strip. And besides, then I’ll be able to do something about it when the Russians invade the USA via Mexico after staging in Venezuela, with help from the Chinese in Panama and Cuba.
I still have not heard Obama suggest that he is willing to drop his planned tax hikes in the face of the economic downturn. I doubt you have, either. Obama claims his planned tax hikes will only affect the rich. It’s hard to tell if he’s simply lying, or simply ignorant, but no rational, honest person can believe that. Check this out.
10 Things You Need to Know About Senator Obama’s Tax Proposals
Fathi Hammad: The approaching victory, about which we are talking, is not limited to Palestine. You are creating the ethos of victory for all Arabs and Muslims, and Allah willing, even on the global level. Why? Because Allah has chosen you to fight the people He hates most – the Jews. Allah said: “You shall find the worst enemies of the believers to be the Jews and the polytheists.” In other words, the Jews, who number 15 million all over the world, are equivalent to 4.5 billion infidels in their corruption and their struggle against the religion of Islam. Therefore, our heroic prisoners who were arrested for killing Jews should know that by the grace of Allah, killing a single Jew is the same as killing 30 million Jews. Therefore, the reward of our martyrs is great, and your reward is also great.
There are about 80 Muslims for each Jew in the world.
Be it myth, legend, tale or fable we all know these four words and understand them to be a preamble to the telling of a make-believe story (though possibly based on fact). Such stories serve many purposes, not the least of which is to teach an object lesson to the very young, a meaningful and memorable way to instruct children about great and noble virtues such as loyalty, honor, courage and truth.
Chicken Little is one such story. The diminuitive foul who determines Armageddon is at hand after being struck on the head by an acorn. The story proceeds with Chicken Little determining the best course of action is to tell the king whereupon a journey commences and various encounters with other creatures ensue. Depending on which version of the story is told, a final encounter with a deceitful fox who manipulates the circumstances brings about a close call or bad ending to the story.
I find several interesting parallels to current events.
By most media accounts Barack Obama’s tour of Iraq, Israel, the West Bank, Jordan and Western Europe was a big success. The visits showed his worldwide popularity is very broad and ranges from people in the street, to US military personnel, to heads of state.
Obama’s visit to Iraq – to the regret of Bush and McCain no doubt – revealed that the al-Maliki government supports his timetable for withdrawal. This was a big plus for the Democratic candidate for president.
What most researchers agree on is that the very first functioning life would have had three basic components: a container, a way to harvest energy and an information carrier like RNA or another nucleic acid.
Szostak’s earlier work has shown that the container probably took the form of a layer of fatty acids that could self-assemble based on their reaction to water (see video). One tip of the acid is hydrophilic, meaning it’s attracted to water, while the other tip is hydrophobic. When researchers put a lot of these molecules together, they circle the wagons against the water and create a closed loop.
These membranes, with the right mix of chemicals, can allow nucleic acids in under some conditions and keep them trapped inside in others.
That opens the possibility that one day, in the distant past, an RNA-like molecule wandered into a fatty acid and started replicating. That random event, through billions of evolutionary iterations, researchers
You have to love that phrase, “…an RNA-like molecule wandered into a fatty acid and started replicating.” Where’d the RNA molecule come from? Here’s an idea about it. It’s all, uh, gobbledygook to me, so I leave the evaluation to others. But in the science journalism area, I haven’t seen much made of this, and the biologists I’ve read still seem to find a fundamental disconnect between the kind of conditions that might have allowed spontaneous development of protein and those that would allow even the survival of RNA. It seems to be a chicken/egg problem… with the logical difficulty of rules which state you can’t have chickens without eggs, and you can’t have eggs without chickens, so both have to begin simultaneously, and no one really has an idea for how that could have happened.
The one thing that everyone seems to admit…. there is no evidence that any of these things are what actually happened.
I have no idea if scientists will eventually create “life”. If they do, it seems likely that it will be a kludge compared to the elegance of the cell. But one possible offshoot from this could be some incredible nanotechnology…
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, the number two House Democrat in authority (behind only Speaker Nancy Pelosi), in defending his party from responsibility for the defeat of the financial stability bill today, delivered the all-time lamest excuse I’ve ever heard (my transcription from video on the PBS NewsHour; boldface mine):
“No Democrat that we could get to vote for the bill didn’t vote for the bill.”
Behind that tortured double-negative is a tautology. This is empty double-talk — delivered by the dishonest, intended for the gullible.
CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, is well known by students of the group as being sympathetic to terrorism and radical Islam, founded by people with ties to HAMAS, and an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the Holy Land Foundation case resulting from attempts to illegaly fund HAMAS.
Now, CAIR is trying to shut down the distribution of a DVD about radical Islam, saying it violates election law.
A U.S. Muslim advocacy group Tuesday asked the Federal Election Commission to investigate whether a nonprofit group that distributed a controversial DVD about Islam in newspapers nationwide is a “front” for an Israel-based group with a stealth goal of helping Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
The promoters of “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” denied trying to promote any presidential campaign. They said it’s also incorrect to tie the DVD campaign to Jerusalem-based educational group Aish HaTorah International, although current and former employees are involved with the project.
The Council for American-Islamic Relations asked the FEC to investigate the DVD distribution, which targeted about 28 million households mostly in battleground election states.
A federal judge in Hawaii has dismissed a lawsuit trying to stop the world’s largest atom smasher.
The Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported that a US District court judge says in a ruling issued Friday that federal courts don’t have jurisdiction over the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
Two Hawaii residents sued because they feared the machine could create black holes or other phenomena that could destroy the planet.
Most physicists say the collider is safe. It started low-power operation Sept. 10 but suffered malfunctions and will be shut down until spring.
Maybe the federal bailout of Wall Street won’t matter so much after all….
UPDATE: Some folks are claiming the collider will create energies not seen since the Big Bang….
An Internet entrepreneur’s latest effort to make space launch more affordable paid off Sunday when his commercial rocket carrying a dummy payload was lofted into orbit.
It was the fourth attempt by Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, to launch its two-stage Falcon 1 rocket into orbit.
The Hawthorne, California-based rocket maker was started by multimillionaire Elon Musk, who made his fortune as co-founder of the PayPal Inc. electronic payment system.
The rocket carried a 364-pound (165-kilogram) dummy payload designed and built by SpaceX for the launch.
Here are the first few paragraphs of a scholarly paper presented at “Race and Gender Preferences at the Crossroads,” a conference organized by the California Association of Scholars and cosponsored by the American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI) and the Center for Equal Opportunity, held January 19, 2008, at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. The title of the paper is The Effects of Proposition 209 on California: Higher Education, Public Employment, and Contracting 09/25/2008 Charles L. Geshekter
In 1996, Californians overwhelmingly approved Proposition 209 that prohibited all state agencies from using anyone’s race, ethnicity, or gender to discriminate against them or give them preference in university admissions, public employment, or competition for a state contract.
Those who opposed Proposition 209 predicted that ending racial or gender favoritism would result in sharp declines in black and Hispanic college enrollments, setbacks for women in public employment, reduced funds for cancer detection centers and domestic violence shelters, or other alarmingly negative effects.
