Random Thoughts (Political Edition)

I'll second that. The war was shit, but don't knock the people who faught for their country, they were brave, very brave.
 
http://www.abc27.com/Global/story.asp?S=14209391

HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) - Gov. Tom Corbett is proposing a state budget that would eliminate more than 1,500 state jobs, slash more than a hundred line-items, and cut nearly $850 million in annual spending.

More than 1,200 jobs would be eliminated from the Department of Public Welfare; 774 from mental health services.

Among the deepest spending cuts are to higher education. The State System of Higher Education would see its funding cut in half, from about $503 million to approximately $232 million next year.

Funding to Penn State University would be slashed from about $333 million to about $165 million; while Pitt, Temple and Lincoln would also see their funding slashed in half.

In his budget address Tuesday morning, Corbett said many of the other spending cuts are to legislative initiatives, discretionary accounts, and "walking around money."....

I can't help but be a bit worried about this. I know deficit = bad, but to cut things so deeply is going to be pretty devastating for college kids who are barely making it in tuition wise. Hopefully they'll be able to find a middle ground. :)
 
Interesting take that Walker may win the battle but lose the war.

http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2011/03/04/gov-scott-walker-has-lost-the-war/

In what may be the result of one of the great political miscalculations of our time, Scott Walker?s popularity in his home state is fast going down the tubes.

A Rasmussen poll out today reveals that almost 60% of likely Wisconsin voters now disapprove of their aggressive governor?s performance, with 48% strongly disapproving.

While these numbers are clearly indicators of a strategy gone horribly wrong, there are some additional findings in the poll that I suspect deserve even greater attention.

It turns out that the state?s public school teachers are very popular with their fellow Badgers. With 77% of those polled holding a high opinion of their educators, it is not particularly surprising that only 32% among households with children in the public school system approve of the governor?s performance. Sixty-seven percent (67%) disapprove, including 54% who strongly disapprove.

Can anyone imagine a politician succeeding with numbers like this among people who have kids?

These numbers should be of great concern not only to Governor Walker but to governors everywhere who were planning to follow down the path of war with state employee unions. You can?t take on the state worker unions without taking on the teachers ? and the teachers are more popular than Gov. Walker and his cohorts appear to realize.

The data should also weigh heavily on the minds of each and every Republican gearing up to run for president in 2012 as the actions of Governor Walker, Kasich and anyone else planning to enter this fight are bringing Christmas to the Obama re-election campaign as they return rank and file union members to where they once lived - the Democratic Party.

The defection of union members to the Republican Party has been an important part of the electoral math for successful GOP candidates for many years now and a real thorn in the side for the democrats.

Consider the re-election campaign of President George W. Bush where success came down to winning the vote in Northeastern Ohio.

I?m from Northeastern Ohio. I can tell you without hesitation that union flows through the blood of these people who spent so much of their lives in the steel mills (before they closed up) and are reminded each and every day of how well their union looked out for them. While a number of these people are retired and living on their pensions provided by their collective bargaining agreement, their kids ? many of whom do not hold union jobs- remain very appreciative of what the unions did for mom and dad.

While this appreciation may not have prevented these people from siding politically with the social philosophy of George W. Bush ? as they did- had Bush taken on the unions in his re-election bid, the outcome would likely have been very different.

These strong, emotional attachments to the unions persist in many of the rust belt states where so many key presidential battlegrounds can be found.

While Governor Walker may yet succeed in getting his budget repair bill through the legislative process and accomplish his goal of reducing collective bargaining to a shell of its former self, the larger battle appears to already be lost. And while Walker ? still in the earliest stages of his term-may be able to recover over the next three and a half years, from a national perspective, I don?t know that Walker?s future makes any difference at all.

The damage has already been done.

Should Gov. Walker accomplish his goal, he will have stoked a level of union anger that I very much suspect will become a key driver in an Obama victory in 2012. He will also have prompted the nation?s unions to work together for a common objective? a feat that would have seemed impossible just one month ago.

If Walker loses his fight, he will have reminded the unions of the importance of fighting back against their enemies, reminding them of how life was for their forbearers who fought to establish the modern union movement. This will ignite the passion for battle while reminding those union folks who have been voting republican of the importance of sticking with the party that sticks with them.

Walker would have done well to take ?yes? for an answer when the unions agreed to his financial proposals. Given the procedural advantages in Ohio, where the GOP legislators could push through the anti-collective bargaining bill without the need for Democratic legislators, Walker should have backed down and allowed John Kasich to take the lead in the effort.

The Wisconsin governor?s desire to be at the forefront of his perceived GOP revolution may not only have doomed the anti-union effort, but it may forever label him as the man who gave the democrats the gift that keeps on giving ? the return of the union rank and file into the arm

He is absolutely right that over the past decade or so union members have drifted to the GOP for social reasons. They have voted against their own economic best interests because the GOP lured them in using social issues and culture war BS.

Walker may just end up reversing that trend.
 
I think that's spot on. Governor Walker has really fucked his own chances of re-election, that's for sure. For one thing, union turnout is as good as the religious right, the republican base in the most conservative parts of the south.

Thing is, I'm quite sure a lot of those conservatives, well, that's what they've called themselves, are union people. Probably not the teacher's unions, but other unions.

In effect, Walker is fucked, and so is the republican party in Wisconsin, I would suggest.

The big question is wether or not this sures up reelection for Obama. I don't know that it does. I think it will lead to the GOP taking a big hit in congressional election (and taking back the house wouldn't be such a bad thing..), if Obama can gather momentum, from a surge of democratic progress in the campaign, I think reelection is safer now than it was a few months ago.

This might turn out to be a disaster for the GOP.

First rule of politics is give people what they want. But never forget that the people rarely, if ever, know what the fuck they want. Politicians who flip-flop are weak. But the biggest wafflers of all is the people.
 
Chinese Citizen Held for Exporting US Military Know-how
March 08, 2011

The U.S. Justice Department says a Chinese citizen working for an American technology company has been arrested for sending sensitive defense-related information to China.

A statement Tuesday says U.S. agents arrested Liu Sixing, also known as Steve Liu, at his home and charged him with one count of exporting technical military data without a license.

Liu, who has permanent residency status in the United States, worked for the New Jersey-based company from March 2009 until November 2010 as a senior engineer on a team developing precision navigation devices.

Court documents say he boarded a flight from Newark to China last November, but upon returning from Shanghai, he was found to have a non-work issued computer containing hundreds of documents about the company's projects.

A search also revealed images of a presentation Liu made to a technology conference organized by the Chinese government.

Officials say Liu never told the company about his travel or his role in the conference, which is in violation of the company's security rules.

If convicted, Liu faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

The Justice Department statement says Liu holds a doctoral degree in electrical engineering and was part of the research and development team that worked on precision navigation devices and other innovative components for the U.S. Department of Defense.

It says Liu was never issued a company laptop, and did not have the authority to access company data outside of its New Jersey facility.

Edward Kahrer, head of the FBI's office in Newark, New Jersey, said the case "raised very serious questions," describing the technology he helped develop as "critical to our military infrastructure."

U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said according to the complaint, Liu violated the rules of his company and the laws of this country".

http://www.voanews.com/english/news...Exporting-US-Military-Know-how-117609728.html

It is disappointing just how many Chinese-American and Chinese working in the United States are caught selling secrets to China. There seems to be a new one caught every few weeks.
 
It is disappointing just how many Chinese-American and Chinese working in the United States are caught selling secrets to China. There seems to be a new one caught every few weeks.

we're just better at not getting caught
 
Seems Clear Channel hires actors to call in to it's programs to act as real callers.

http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/58759/radio-daze/

Radio Daze
This week?s parasha introduces a medium for distinguishing truth from falsehood. On the radio, where actors are hired to read scripts and pretend to be real people, things aren?t so simple.


Last year, a young man called in to a radio station with a problem. He?d recently attended a bachelor party, he said, and a friend of the groom-to-be, clueless of the unwritten etiquette of maledom, brought his girlfriend along, derailing what was supposed to be a weekend of gambling, girls, and general debauchery. The caller told his story with passion and verve, and then asked the station?s listeners for their advice on how to treat his clueless pal.

Or at least he would have, had this been a real conversation. The young man?who asked to remain nameless in order to protect his chances for future employment?was an actor, and the staged call an audition. A short while later, he received the following email: ?Thank you for auditioning for Premiere On Call,? it said. ?Your audition was great! We?d like to invite you to join our official roster of ?ready-to-work? actors.? The job, the email indicated, paid $40 an hour, with one hour guaranteed per day.

But what exactly was the work? The question popped up during the audition and was explained, the actor said, clearly and simply: If he passed the audition, he would be invited periodically to call in to various talk shows and recite various scenarios that made for interesting radio. He would never be identified as an actor, and his scenarios would never be identified as fabricated?which they always were.


?I was surprised that it seemed so open,? the actor told me in an interview. ?There was really no pretense of covering it up.?

Curious, the actor did some snooping and learned that Premiere On Call was a service offered by Premiere Radio Networks, the largest syndication company in the United States and a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications, the entertainment and advertising giant. Premiere syndicates some of the more sterling names in radio, including Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity. But a great radio show depends as much on great callers as it does on great hosts: Enter Premiere On Call.

?Premiere On Call is our new custom caller service,? read the service?s website, which disappeared as this story was being reported (for a cached version of the site click here). ?We supply voice talent to take/make your on-air calls, improvise your scenes or deliver your scripts. Using our simple online booking tool, specify the kind of voice you need, and we?ll get your the right person fast. Unless you request it, you won?t hear that same voice again for at least two months, ensuring the authenticity of your programming for avid listeners.?

The actors hired by Premiere to provide the aforementioned voice talents sign confidentiality agreements and so would not go on the record. But their accounts leave little room for doubt. All of the actors I questioned reported receiving scripts, calling in to real shows, pretending to be real people. Frequently, one actor said, the calls were live, sometimes recorded in advance, but never presented on-air as anything but real.

Michael Harrison, the editor of Talkers Magazine, the talk-radio world?s leading trade publication, said he knew nothing of this particular service but was not altogether surprised to hear that it was in place. There was, he said, a tradition of ?creating fake phone calls for the sake of entertainment on some of the funny shows, shock jocks shows, the kind of shows you hear on FM music stations in the morning, they would regularly have scenarios, crazy scenarios of people calling up and doing pranks.?

Rachel Nelson, a Premiere Radio Networks spokesperson, defended the Premiere on Call service and said that responsibility for how it is employed falls ultimately to those who use it.

?Premiere provides a wide variety of audio services for radio stations across the country, one of which is connecting local stations in major markets with great voice talent to supplement their programming needs,? Nelson wrote in an email. ?Voice actors know this service as Premiere On Call. Premiere, like many other content providers, facilitates casting?while character and script development, and how the talent?s contribution is integrated into programs, are handled by the varied stations.?

***

In a strange way, this week?s Torah portion anticipates the state of affairs brought about by Premiere On Call. The parasha discusses a priestly vestment known as the hoshen. It?s a breastplate worn by the high priest, fitted with 12 jewels and looking a bit like a telephone keypad. And, like a telephone, it was an instrument of communication: The hoshen housed the urim and thummim, mysterious holy objects that, most scholars believe, were used for divination. In particularly fraught times, when truth and lies had to be sorted apart, the hoshen was called into service. It was, in a way, one of our earliest pieces of technology, a man-made object used to communicate, in this case, with the divine.

We?ve come a long way. Far from harbingers of truth, our media are now increasingly used to shake the foundations of the real. We know this to be the case with television, where the stars of reality programming are frequently found to follow the blueprints of writers and producers. And we know it to be the case online, where identity has become a playground and masquerading the norm. But radio seemed different. We listen to radio because the voice, we think, doesn?t lie. The voice is immediate and intimate and present. We attach ourselves to radio personalities with an intensity we?d never dream to extend to, say, television hosts?just look at the fierce and unparalleled devotion to Howard Stern?and this is because we feel as if we know them and trust them.

It is time to question this notion as well. The next caller you hear, the next personal story that makes you sniffle or shout with rage, may be the doing of someone at some faceless casting agency, hiring actors and writing scripts designed to titillate. The point is, without something like the hoshen, an object capable of channeling the celestial spirit and telling truth from lie, we?ll never know.
 
Are you more proud of being a racist or an asshole?
 
Are you more proud of being a racist or an asshole?

Generally speaking Australia is not a competitor for superpower status. As long as they do not sell the secrets to a country like China the damage will be minimal. Not sure what racism (in this case it would not be racism, "Chinese" is not a race but a nationality) has to do with it (I would wager I am less racist and less bigoted that you but I digress). The concept of the "Anglosphere" is neither racist nor bigoted. Countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States do share commonalities that other countries do not and for the past several decades those countries have shared a close relationship.
 
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It is disappointing just how many Chinese-American and Chinese working in the United States are caught selling secrets to China. There seems to be a new one caught every few weeks.
It's a very long time since I've gotten disappointed over espionage. I'll say this once: Espionage makes the world a safer place.

As I don't work in China, I do not know to what extent the CIA have human resources on the ground in China. I'm willing to bet there are some. I am willing to bet the US pays for political and military intelligence, and in some instances probably even technical intelligence.

It's quite simply how it works. Stop being disappointed over it. It's how the world workes.


Seems Clear Channel hires actors to call in to it's programs to act as real callers.

http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/58759/radio-daze/
Completely incompatible with yournalistic integrity.
 
I could care less if Australians steal secrets. Anglosphere and all of that.

Julian Assange is Australian.



BOOM! Out of the park!
 
Just for the record, what about Scandinavia, other western countries (like for instance France and Germany), then? :)
 
As with Australia it does depend on what they do with the information. As I was speaking about primarily industrial and military secrets I do not see western countries as a substantial threat. There may be some economic damage (as with all industrial espionage) but unless there is a radical policy shift in Europe the military threat is minimal. China is a military threat, Europe is not.

Ultimately I consider the "western" world as a block of countries with broadly similar interests and goals. Countries within this block are unlikely to go to war with each other. There is competition between the countries in this block of course but the hostility is minimal.
 
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It doesn't matter who steals the info, tech, specs, or actual equipment, it is stolen. It also does not matter what language they speak or the color of their skin.
 
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