COLLECTIVE MADNESS
“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
Can't watch it at work here. What is it in a nutshell?
ReplyDeleteFollow the Money: Rezko under investigation and deep in debt buys lot
ReplyDeleteAccording to a "previously sealed court transcript," Rezko, who is in debt by $50 million, now "relies on 'family' handouts of $7,500 a month to pay monthly costs." ABC News wrote that "Rezko's bleak financial picture raises the question of how the Rezkos were able to buy a vacant lot adjoining the home of Sen. Barack Obama in 2005, at a time Rezko says he was already in deep debt."
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Follow the Money: Auchi's money, Rezko's lot, Obama's house
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Follow the Money: Auchi: Indicted Blagojevich fundraiser got loan from Iraqi billionaire
Sure hope he doesn't have that whole 50 Million on a credit card, or worse, a sub-prime adjustable!
ReplyDeleteWhat's the old adage?
ReplyDelete"Capital goes where it is invited and it stays where it is welcome."
Interesting stats from Heritage on monetary / economic freedom between the United States and the United Arab Emirates.
Would like to know more about the "free zones" in the UAE where it appears foreigners can actually own stuff.
Murtha Blasts McCain Over Tanker Contract
ReplyDeleteFox News Channel
Air Force Secretary Defends Tanker Contract Award to European Manufacturer
Seeking Alpha
In Defense of Northrup-Grumman's USAF Contract Win
POLITICO The Crypt
Reid calls for congressional hearings on tanker deal
The Earth Times Online Newspaper
Boeing demands Air Force brief on tanker contract
Reuters
House panel calls hearing on tanker deal
F.D.A. Finds Contaminant in Blood Thinner
ReplyDeleteHeparin, linked to at least 19 deaths, contained a possibly counterfeit ingredient that mimicked the real drug.
Heparin is made from pig intestines. Scientific Protein Laboratories, based in Waunakee, Wis., bought raw heparin produced in some cases in small, unregulated family workshops in China.
The F.D.A. admitted last month that it had violated its own policies by failing to inspect Scientific Protein’s China plant prior to approving the drug for sale. The agency sent inspectors to the plant last month who found that at least some heparin was made from “material from an unacceptable workshop vendor.”
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"Free" Trade,
It's All Good.
ReplyDeleteReport: Syrian Man Butchers Baby Nephew in Supermarket
A Syrian man decapitated his 15-month-old nephew with a knife before his mother's eyes at a supermarket in Jeddah.
"He chopped off the boy's head in front of the mother to get back at her."
Brother d,
ReplyDeleteStarling Hunter's Place might be a good place to look and ask questions.
He's been in Dubai for about 5 yrs, I think.
Used to post @ Belmont.
Piracy By The State Investor's Business Daily Editorials
Cheers for Chile’s Chicago Boys Guy Sorman City Journal Winter 2008
Posted by Starling Hunter
The Rainbow Coalition Evaporates
ReplyDeleteBlack anger grows as illegal immigrants transform urban neighborhoods.
Abu Dhabi: East Leans West
While radical Islamists fight to restore the Dark Ages, a modernizing sheikhdom invests in Western culture.
We are the world, doug.
ReplyDeleteYou keep posting these anedotes from the 'little people". Folks that never mattered, and still do not.
Oh, the outrage!
Immigrant costs soar for border counties
Study: Police work saps funds from other services
Diana Marrero
Republic Washington Bureau
Mar. 5, 2008 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - Illegal immigration is costing Arizona border counties millions a year for law enforcement and criminal prosecutions, diverting money from parks, libraries and other law-enforcement efforts, according to a study to be released today.
The costs to the four border counties in Arizona increased 39 percent, from $19.2 million in fiscal 1999 to $26.6 million in fiscal 2006, researchers at the University of Arizona and San Diego State University found.
For the nation's 24 border counties in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, the costs related to illegal immigration in fiscal 2006 were $192 million, more than double the costs in 1999.
All on Team43's watch. With McCain in the vanguard of the new America, which has Panama as a "natural" part of the United States.
Get with the Program, go with the flow!
Compassion, that I can understand, what is it "they" were conserving, anyway?
Green Party US’s almost singular focus on ballot access as well as electoral politics, generally, and presidential candidacies, specifically - as part of a "trickle down" strategy of party growth - is terribly misguided. Building a broad-based social movement, one that includes themes of economic justice, ecology, and social justice as well as a recognition of the importance of so-called "identity politics" to a comprehensive critique of the dominant order, around the idea of citizenship is an idea that was part of the beginnings of the American Green movement.
ReplyDeleteThough they were ultimately futile in their attempts to maintain a decidedly "bottom-up" movement focus within the Green Party, social ecologists and other forward thinking elements advocated just this position. They stressed the importance of education and historical perspective as part of engaging in movements oriented at everyday concerns and far-reaching, reconstructive visions of a liberatory, ecological human society.
Is it possible that progressives may have learned enough from the experiences of the recent election cycles to reconsider the hazards of an electoral, party-based focus? With economic recession and both the global warming and an enduring "War on Terror" looming as momentous challenges for both near and short term, here’s hoping.
Building a Movement
Folks that vote their beliefs, do not waste their vote. But folks that want to support the "winner". do.
ReplyDeleteFolks like rufus, who denounced Librarians for not sticking with the GOP in November of '06, but now abandon the Party of Lincoln.
Now rufus begins to understand the perils of Party loyalty, where as before, that was all that mattered. Others should have voted the Party line, while now he can abandon it, with clear conscience.
Oh, the hypocrisy he now maintains as rightous indignation. All because of the candidate, he abandons Party. While when others did the same, what low down dirty dogs they were.
Vote Republican values
Vote Foley, Craig, Renzi
That was the rufus battle cry, in November 2006
Instead of supporting a Green or a Librarian, rufus now seeks to join with the winner, lest he waste his vote. While he and those like him waste their honor, instead.
No new hope for the US, just more of the same
Vote Whig!
Vote Federalist!
Those Republicans were just a third Party, do not ride that wave!
Oh so it was said, in 1860.
Cato presentation stops every 10 sec. or so.
ReplyDeleteLaffer backround at Heritage:
June 1, 2004
The Laffer Curve: Past, Present, and Future
by Arthur B. Laffer
Backgrounder #1765
The story of how the Laffer Curve got its name begins with a 1978 article by Jude Wanniski in The Public Interest entitled, "Taxes, Revenues, and the `Laffer Curve.'"1 As recounted by Wanniski (associate editor of The Wall Street Journal at the time), in December 1974, he had dinner with me (then professor at the University of Chicago), Donald Rumsfeld (Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford), and Dick Cheney (Rumsfeld's deputy and my former classmate at Yale) at the Two Continents Restaurant at the Washington Hotel in Washington, D.C. While discussing President Ford's "WIN" (Whip Inflation Now) proposal for tax increases, I supposedly grabbed my napkin and a pen and sketched a curve on the napkin illustrating the trade-off between tax rates and tax revenues. Wanniski named the trade-off "The Laffer Curve."
I personally do not remember the details of that evening, but Wanniski's version could well be true. I used the so-called Laffer Curve all the time in my classes and with anyone else who would listen to me to illustrate the trade-off between tax rates and tax revenues. My only question about Wanniski's version of the story is that the restaurant used cloth napkins and my mother had raised me not to desecrate nice things.
The Historical Origins of the Laffer Curve
The Laffer Curve, by the way, was not invented by me. For example, Ibn Khaldun, a 14th century Muslim philosopher, wrote in his work The Muqaddimah: "It should be known that at the beginning of the dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments."
A more recent version (of incredible clarity) was written by John Maynard Keynes:
When, on the contrary, I show, a little elaborately, as in the ensuing chapter, that to create wealth will increase the national income and that a large proportion of any increase in the national income will accrue to an Exchequer, amongst whose largest outgoings is the payment of incomes to those who are unemployed and whose receipts are a proportion of the incomes of those who are occupied...
Nor should the argument seem strange that taxation may be so high as to defeat its object, and that, given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance than an increase of balancing the budget. For to take the opposite view today is to resemble a manufacturer who, running at a loss, decides to raise his price, and when his declining sales increase the loss, wrapping himself in the rectitude of plain arithmetic, decides that prudence requires him to raise the price still more--and who, when at last his account is balanced with nought on both sides, is still found righteously declaring that it would have been the act of a gambler to reduce the price when you were already making a loss.2
[...]
I started 'P J O'Rourke on The Wealth of Nations' yesterday. Because O'Rourke's funnier than Adam Smith. And because I'm too lazy anymore to read The Wealth of Nations myself.
If anyone here hasn't read O'Rourke's 'Eat the Rich' - it's a great read. Put it together with Hazlitt's awesome 'Economics in One Lesson' (both books, four days' reading, tops - maybe seven if you can't call in sick) and you, too, can irritate and annoy liberals at cocktail parties while seeming to know far more than you actually do. If that's not a mission in life, I don't what is.
THe Laffer Curve is the same as Sam Walton's
ReplyDeleteMake more, by making less, but selling more.
It is just a matter of volume.
Velocity of cash flow.
But to quote a Muslim, why they never have had an original thought.
Read it at the BC, must be true.
I go to BC to read whiskey_199's comments. He's a one-man satire of a keyboard commando and for entertainment purposes really can't be beat.
ReplyDeleteThat certainly has a ring of truth to it. whiskey is an entertaining diversion from reality.
ReplyDeleteMost of the "old gang" is gone.
The advertising gambit failed
The Belmont Club is supported largely by donations from its readers.
Which in times past, such support was discouraged. Not required we were told, production not a matter of revenue.
Times they are a changin'
The Laffer Curve even reaching the BC
Ralph Waldo Emerson said the universe is balanced in all ways. Raise the taxes too much, people aren't gonna pay, tax 'em too much, they won't do anything, won't work. If the price is too high, they won't buy. If there is no market for the corn, they won't plant. etc. Emerson was an optimist at heart. If one party mucks up for too long, they'll take their votes elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteHe was writing before the income tax.
More immigrants, at lower costs, increase productivity.
ReplyDeleteFrom Tony Blakely.
So Chertoff's announcement less than two weeks ago was good news. But only five days later -- last Thursday -- The Washington Post reported: "The Bush administration has scaled back plans to quickly build a 'virtual fence' along the US-Mexico border, delaying completion of the first phase of the project by at least three years and shifting away from a network of tower-mounted sensors and surveillance gear."
Technical problems with the same 28-mile project that Secretary Chertoff personally had vouchsafed were cited by Homeland Security Department officials as the reason for the three-year delay of the project -- which, let me remind you, the secretary had said just five days before was ready to go operational.
So instead of starting the promised-for, partially funded border fence on President Bush's watch -- as he promised -- his new plans provide for the first 28 miles of the 2,000-mile fence to be started in the third year of the next presidency. I guess he never really wanted to build that fence.
But Secretary Chertoff did promise to "double the fleet" of our unmanned surveillance aircraft -- from three to six for 2,000 miles of the border.
About 75 percent of the public wants our border secured. I guess that does not include the president -- nor the Democratic Party candidates to replace him.
Nor John McCain, for that matter.
So instead of starting the promised-for, partially funded border fence on President Bush's watch -- as he promised -- his new plans provide for the first 28 miles of the 2,000-mile fence to be started in the third year of the next presidency. I guess he never really wanted to build that fence.
ReplyDeleteEven Tony Blakely is getting the message, loud and clear, five by five.
Even rufus.
Wonder if Yony will vote Democrat, or find a new way forward?
Librarians help people find facts.
Lots of folks take an interest in US Presidential politics, or So It Is Claimed
ReplyDeleteI would, too, if I were them, bob.
ReplyDeleteObama's stated position, as well as that of Hillary, is that of the UAW and AFL-CIO. Opposition to the US-Colombia FTA and new restrictions on and/or decreases in military aid. (Although military aid's already been cut and Colombia's making up the difference with a 5 year 'war tax' passed last year.) Together with the expressed desire to engage Chavez, FARC would find Obama a more attractive WH occupant. So the story, legitimately sourced or not, really isn't much of one.
Maybe a photo of Obama and Reyes at the FARC May Day celebration last year...
Dammit! I done been p'wned. De Rat's nailed me. I cud babble on; but, I'd just be a p'wned babbler.
ReplyDeleteSheesh
shuffles off, muttering
Exuent, stage right, shuffles off, a p'wned ol' bear, growling to hisself....:)
ReplyDeleteI, personally, don't want to be hooked up to one of THESE.Lord only knows what they'd come up with accessing a person's dreams, most of which are forgotten by the dreamer come morn. But, if the Idaho Supreme Court has said, as I think they have, that in this state you can't pump a person's stomach to get evidence, I'd hope they'd rule you can't suck out so to speak a person's brain waves, either.
ReplyDeleteDeuce, Whit, Rufus, Trish, Mat, Sam, Rat, Doug, Culter, Everybody Else, what's on your mind today?:)
Here's the article---
ReplyDeleteScary or sensational? A machine that can look into the mindJames Randerson, science correspondent The Guardian, Thursday March 6 2008
Scientists have developed a computerised mind-reading technique which lets them accurately predict the images that people are looking at by using scanners to study brain activity.
The breakthrough by American scientists took MRI scanning equipment normally used in hospital diagnosis to observe patterns of brain activity when a subject examined a range of black and white photographs. Then a computer was able to correctly predict in nine out of 10 cases which image people were focused on. Guesswork would have been accurate only eight times in every 1,000 attempts.
The study raises the possibility in the future of the technology being harnessed to visualise scenes from a person's dreams or memory.
Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists, led by Dr Jack Gallant from the University of California at Berkeley, said: "Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone. Imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience at any moment in time."
It will inevitably also raise fears that a suspect's brain could be interrogated against their will, raising the nightmarish possibility of interrogation for "thought crimes". The researchers say this is currently firmly in the realm of science fiction because the technique can only be applied to visual images and, to date, the experiments rely on cumbersome MRI scanning equipment and extremely powerful magnets. The software decoder itself has to be adapted to each individual during hours of training while in the scanner.
However the team have warned about potential privacy issues in the future when scanning techniques improve. "It is possible that decoding brain activity could have serious ethical and privacy implications downstream in, say, the 30 to 50-year time frame," said Prof Gallant. "[We] believe strongly that no one should be subjected to any form of brain-reading process involuntarily, covertly, or without complete informed consent."
The technique relies on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a standard technique that creates images of brain activity based on changes in blood flow to different brain regions. The first step is to train the software decoder by scanning a subject's visual cortex while they view thousands of images over five hours. This teaches the decoder how that person's brain codes visual information. The next stage is to take a new set of images and use the decoder to predict the brain activity it would expect if the subject was viewing each of them. Finally, the subject views images from this second set while in the scanner. "We simply look through the list of predicted activities to see which one is most similar to the observed activity, and that's our guess," said Gallant.
The software matched their observed brain activity with the predicted activity from the decoder. When using a set of 120 images, the software got it right nine out of 10 times. With 1,000 images, the accuracy was eight out of 10. For 120 images, if the software were to simply make random predictions, its success rate would be just 0.8%.
The team estimate that if they used 1bn images (roughly the number on Google) it would have a success rate of 20%. With that many images, Gallant said, the software is close to doing true image reconstruction - working out what you are seeing from scratch. "There is no reason we shouldn't be able to solve this problem ... That's what we are working on now."
Gallant said it might be possible in future to apply the technology to visual memories or dreams. "Probably the visual hardware is engaged and stuff from memory is sort of downloaded into your visual hardware and then replayed," he said. "To the extent that that is true, we should be able to reconstruct imagery in dreams."
However, tests using moving images are not possible because MRI scanners are only able to take a new scan every three to four seconds. Other scientists say the advance should be welcomed as a major leap in understanding brain function.
"I think it's a significant advance," said Prof Marcel Just, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "It's much more exciting than mind reading and police interrogation ... These people are finding how the brain codes naturalistic scenes. They understand what the brain is saying."
"It's definitely an impressive result. It's pushing still further on how we can make inferences about mental states from looking at fMRI activity," said neurologist Dr Steven Laureys at the University of Liège in Belgium. He said the technique could be useful for understanding the mental state of a person who is in a coma.
Sex, what else?
ReplyDeleteTommorrow I'll link a book on sex by another Brain Scanner,
Dr. Amen.
I kid you not.
Doug: Murtha Blasts McCain Over Tanker Contract
ReplyDeleteFrance just got a $40 billion dollar contract to make tankers for the air force. We might have to ask their permission if we want to use them in a war, if we want to keep getting our tankers from France in the future.