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a) You can egg a baby that will turn into a baby when used, so no advantage to be gained. |
b) It actually makes more sense for a baby to come out of an egg. |
If you egg an adult, there's an additional cost associated with it, of actually getting a baby back and having to wait for it to grow. I think that's appropriate. |
JustinGuy likes this. |
17. Squizzel_Boy likes this. |
18. :D Oh Good now get some sleep wait its only erm... 8:25pm over there Its 10:25pm here :p |
Beware of Sins |
The greatest of trials is when your enemies’ rejoice over your downfall; the enmity of the devil is ancient, as it started from the day on which Allah, “And mention when We aid to the angels, ‘Prostrate before Adam’; spot they prostrated, except for Ibis. He refused and was arrogant and became of the disbelievers.” (al-Baqarah 2:34) And the envy of Shaytan started from the moment it was said, “Will You place therein one who will do harm therein and will shed blood?” (al-Baqarah 2:30) |
On the other hand, the joy of your peers is the greatest joy of all; therefore the envious ones greatest revenge is when you neglect or overlook your religious obligations, so if you wish to avenge your enviers, you must rectify yourself and your affairs. Nevertheless, observe how you have rejected the opportunity yourself, and allowed your enemies to gloat over your mistakes and shortcomings. As one poet said: ‘Enemies cannot do harm to an ignorant, as much as the ignorant does harm to himself.’ Woe to you, succeed in overcoming your desires as you shall praise the consequences of your safety. As one poet said: ‘A person is pleased when tasting the sweet, but the sweet becomes bitter after it causes harm, So taste the bitter if ultimately it shall befall you, and never opt for a sweet that shall fetch you harm’. Beware of sins, for if they did not have any punishment other than feeling the shame of meeting your Lord while you carry these sins upon you, it would have been enough. The best moment of Yaqub, peace be upon him, was when he saw Yusuf after their separation and the most difficult moment to the brothers of Yusuf was when they met him after they had wronged him. If the heart was purest would be in a tumult hen a sin was committed, but if the sin was repeated often then it would pass by the heart, the heart feels a foreign presence that it finds discomfiting. But when the heart is used to the sin, the heart will become accustomed to it, and will accept without a second thought. This is like the example of a person who wears a black garment, since he will not be concerned if he spills black on it. |
O you whose sins have wounded him, you know the ointment that shall soothe you. If you could not afford paying a wailer [i.e. if you cannot weep over your own sins] then suffice by lowering you head out of sorrow and regret because the one in calamity does not go unnoticed. If you couldn’t achieve the glory of Muadh, may Allah be pleased with him, then at least be not unable to taste the humility of the three who stayed back. |
Take strong will to be your guide, if you did not know the way; the bafflement of the seeker may lead him to the water of Madyan. Walk in the valley of the night [engage in night prayer], dismount in the valley of humility while showing the greatest state of wretched humbleness, and be attentive so that the chants of the arrivers [i.e. the pious] may move your hearts. Those who took the path may facilitate the arrival of the one detached from his Lord for how many are those from the first generation who eventually became leaders of armies?! Do not get bored from standing at the door of Allah’s Forgiveness and Mercy even if you are reprimanded, and do not stop apologising for your sins even if you are rejected. When a gate is opened for the incomers [i.e. attained Allah’s Love and Pleasure] rush to it fervently, lay down the head of humility and stretch out your hands while begging you Lord by saying, “be charitable unto us” (Yusuf 12:88) so that the answer you may hear is “No blame will be upon you today” (Yusuf 12:92) |
Seeds of Admonishment and Reform by Imam Ibn Jawzi Pages 113-116 |
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YOU ARE HERE: LAT HomeCollections |
Is It Curtains for the CIA? : The agency is in for a bloodletting. It's more than the Ames case or the string of bad intelligence estimates. Or even dislike of the director. Cold War misdeeds are coming back to haunt it. |
October 09, 1994|Thomas Powers | Thomas Powers, a contributing editor to Opinion, is the author of "The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA" (Knopf). His most recent book is "Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb" (Little Brown) |
SOUTH ROYALTON, VT. — The hour of truth has arrived for the Central Intelligence Agency. Three years after the Soviet Union dissolved while the stunned CIA was in mid-sentence, Congress is preparing for a long second look at the intelligence charter it approved in a climate of crisis in 1947. The first step is creation of a 17-member commission, already approved by the Senate and pending in the House, to study U.S. intelligence needs and how they ought to be met. |
No one at the CIA is in any doubt about what this means: The agency in its current form is no longer sacred. What it will look like at the end of the commission's reassessment, the size of its budget, even the name over the door--all are in question. Intelligence professionals fear the worst. There is an appetite for bloodletting in Washington, fueled by the embarrassment of the Ames case; a sex-bias suit by female employees; a string of bad intelligence estimates; the agency's die-hard resistance to cutting its $3-billion budget; plain dislike of the agency's director, R. James Woolsey, by many legislators, and a growing belief that without the Soviet Union, the CIA has nothing to do. |
Nor is there any lack of bright ideas circulating in Washington for a new and improved intelligence service, and perhaps two. For years, critics have proposed breaking the CIA in half. Some favor one organization to engage in secret intelligence activities, while a second writes up intelligence estimates using information from all sources. Other tinkerers would divide the existing agency differently--between a secret collecting-and-analyzing arm and a separate body to conduct covert operations. |
A few extremists, led by the sharp-tongued Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), suggest dismantling the CIA altogether and going back to the simpler, pre-World War II days, when the State Department collected political intelligence, mainly at diplomatic cocktail parties, and the military kept track of foreign enemies, if any. |
No consensus for reform yet exists, but discontent is high with Woolsey's pugnacious defense of the CIA. A widespread sense that something is badly wrong centers on the agency's numerous, in retrospect, flagrant, failures in handling the case of Aldrich H. Ames--who has admitted spying for Moscow between 1986 and his arrest earlier this year. At least 10 highly placed agents working for the CIA disappeared in the mid-1980s, but the CIA's internal investigators failed to read the implications of conspicuous spending by Ames, or to note many other clues. The Soviets penetrated every other major Western intelligence service during the Cold War, but it is doubtful that any other Soviet spy did as much damage, over so long a period, with the arguable exception of Kim Philby. |
After the CIA's inspector general completed a 400-page report on the Ames case, which sharply criticized a dozen agency officials, Woolsey issued official reprimands criticizing their performance, but otherwise declined to punish the worst offenders. |
The Ames case is one of those highly visible gaffes no official agency could survive unscathed--but even without it, the CIA would have been facing hard times. Despite huge growth during the Reagan years, to a peak of more than 20,000 employees, the CIA failed to grasp what was happening to the Soviet Union under Mikhail S. Gorbachev. |
By the time the Soviet Union broke up, it was apparent that the old Soviet Union was literally bankrupt, that the CIA had for years been overestimating the size of its economy and underestimating the crushing burden of military spending and that the agency did not know what to do with the thousands of analysts and covert operators focused on Moscow once the Soviet threat had disappeared. Almost until the Soviet Union's final moments, the CIA, under Robert M. Gates, had been darkly wondering if it all wasn't some elaborate trick. |
When Woolsey took over in 1993, he inherited an old agency, huge and set in its ways, with which to monitor a new world. He argued that the United States confronted a host of new dangers--each far less threatening than the old Soviet Union, perhaps, but harder to watch in the aggregate. The implication, which he defended with a lawyer's tenacity in budget hearings, was that the CIA couldn't function with less money and, in fact, needed more. |
The lawmakers were put out. They had been cutting Pentagon dollars--spent in their home districts--and they were impatient with Woolsey's claim that the CIA alone should prosper in the post-Cold War world. It is probably the CIA's resistance to change that is most directly responsible for Sen. John W. Warner's plan to rethink U.S. intelligence with the help of a commission armed with a broad mandate to put everything on the table. |
Los Angeles Times Articles |
27 November 2005 |
Does Our Economy Need Poverty? |
One of the deep underlying economic issues at the root of the debate over whether it can work for San Francisco to mandate health insurance, over whether it makes sense to require a "living wage" rather than the record low minimum wage we have now, and whether the American economy is equipped to handle globalization, and a whole host of other economic policy debates, is whether our economy needs poverty to survive. Put in the affirmative, the question is whether it is possible to have a sustainable high wage economy (i.e. one not propped up by low wages elsewhere). |
A big part of this question is the exploitation v. indifference issue. In an exploitation scenario, which comes close to the Marxist idea, the rich are wealthy because they exploit and take economic fruits from, the poor. In an indifference scenario, large pockets of poverty don't receive anything much from the rich, but the rich receive very little from the poor either. |
Significant parts of the poverty we see in the world today more nearly flow from indifference than exploitation. For example, with the exception of mining for precious metals, uranium and oil, very little American wealth derives from the labors of the poor in Africa. Certainly, corporate America does little to make life in Africa better -- it is selfish both in preserving its wealth for itself and in guarding precious intellectual property, like drug patents. But, it also doesn't derive much profit from Africa. |
In the same way, corporate America isn't exploiting, so much as being indifferent to the inner city ghettos that their downtown office towers loom over. It doesn't make its money from the ghettos workers or its consumers in any significant amount, even though it rarely steps up to the plate with sufficient force to make life there better. |
This matters because it implies that where poverty is caused by corporate indifference, rather than exploitation, that the rest of the economy will not be harmed, indeed, it will be helped, if a way to end that poverty can be found. That kind of poverty is not something our economy needs, it is something that arises through some combination of gap in the web of social responsibility (keep in mind that not working alone is no justification for poverty, most Americans, including children, the elderly and homemakers do not hold a paid job of any kind), and a failure to find high productivity activities for the people who are trapped in enclaves of poverty to engage in. |
In contrast, at both the international and domestic level, the working poor may very well be exploited, in the sense that the profits from their efforts may go to benefitting others when different social arrangements could give them a bigger piece of the pie. Internationally, the biggest concern involves unsafe, unenvironmentally unsound factories in places from Mexico to China to Vietnam that pay very low wages to their workers compared to those paid in the places where the goods produced are ultimately used. Domestically, the big concerns are in the low wage service sector (in areas like child care, janitorial work, fast food work and retail sales) and in construction and agriculture, where undocumented immigrants are often paid under the table and receive substandard wages (while driving down wages in those industries generally). |
How important quantitatively those forces are to the economy is unclear. What would a society where chicken factory workers and burger flippers made $12 an hour plus health insurance look like? Clearly, consumption would be more expensive, but how much of an impact would it have on the average family budget? |
Also, exploitation is a sensitive word. Many of the people doing that work feel that they receive an honest wage for honest work and get by well enough, if modestly. From a quality of life perspective, the Chinese factory worker or phone bank worker in India is much better off than the subsistence farmer in Niger who is entirely ignored by the outside world. And, likewise, many undocumented workers cleaning rooms in Aspen or doing construction work in Washington Park would be inclined to say that they have a better life than single parents without work living in public housing in Five Points or Lincoln Park, in Denver. Being "exploited" is not necessarily worse than being ignored by and apart from the larger world economy. |
Similarly, there is real room for debate over whether, in the absence of offshoring and immigration (legal and illegal alike), those jobs would be filled by the people in the United States who are poor now. Would our ghettos be thriving working class neighborhoods instead? In a place like Flint, Michigan, one is pretty tempted to say yes. But, in much of the United States, that is a hard call to make. |
The question won't be answered in this post, but I do think that it is the right question to be asking. Also, it is worth noting that it is not a question that can necessarily be answered from first principles of economic theory. It isn't a question about how markets in general work. It is a question of what is doing on within those markets empirically. But, in the absence of an answer, it is hard to make good policy, so it deserves more attention. |
Blue Cross of California said... |
I hope San Francisco can work to improve health care and provide decent health insurance for all. |
Kyle said... |
I'd like to raise a big HERE HERE to your last paragraph. Those are really important questions to be asking. Those questions are important to use morally. On another level, the question of how long the US can maintain its consumption in the face of a massive trade deficit is of immediate concern to our lifestyles. |
One big player in moving goods made by poor people to the west has been China's government, as without their currency fixing (and massive investment in US currency) prices wouldn't be nearly as cheap. The question I ask myself almost daily is - when will they stop, and what will be the result? What will the Chinese government do with massive amounts of currency that is devaluing sharply, and what will the west do when goods from that country suddenly become much more expensive? |
I doubt the result will be good for anyone. |
Posts Tagged 'Obama' |
What I would do about Sotomayor |
Author: Rory B. Bellows |
Nothing. I’d knock her around for the line about the Court of Appeals is where policy is made. I’d ask the usual questions about judicial activism, but I don’t think the GOP should go overboard. I do not say this out of squishy fears about offending latinos or playing into identity politics. I say this is the tact the GOP should take for the simple fact that of all the people Chairman Obama could have picked, he made an average selection. |
Look, Sotomayor is not going ot re-invent the wheel legal theory. She is not going to make intellectual hefty arguments that could sway Justice Kennedy on one of those 5-4 cases. She is what she is. She’ll sit there, take up space and vote the way the editorial page of the New York Times tells her to vote. Conservatives should hope this nomination goes through or else Chairman Obama could actually appoint someone competent. |
Obama’s new court pick |
Author: Rory B. Bellows |
You. Act. Surprised. We have a leftist on the court. I understand Chairman Obama wants a leftist on the court. He wants a woman and hispanic to check the boxes of the democratic coalition. Fine. Chairman Obama won the election and he gets to pick whomever he wants as a Supreme Court justice. But that does not mean the other side does not get their say and the appointee should not be throughly questioned so America knows what they are in for. And they are in for lurch to the left. |
Justice Sotomayor believes the court is where policy is made. |
She is an advocate of racial discrimination as evidence by her vote on the Ricci case and pro-union voice. Even the liberal The New Republic has a failry damning piece about her temperment and intellect. I suppose it could have been worse, Jermiah Wright or Bill Ayers could have been on the choice but I cannot imagine a member of the judiciary held in such low esteem being the nominee. |
Obama Double-Talk |
Author: Rory B. Bellows |
Nice piece by Reason editor Matt Welch about the natural ease with which Obama celebrates breaking his campaign promises. |
These people want to run the economy |
Author: Rory B. Bellows |
and healthcare and every other aspect of your life, but they don’t even know how much money is left in TARP. Geithner claims $135 billion but the Government Accounting Office says $32 billion. A hundred billion here and a hundred billion there and soon you start talking about real money. |
So much for America |
Author: Rory B. Bellows |
Did you ever think you would live to see the day where a CEO was fired at the direction of the White House? Or how about today’s speech where Obama declared GM the winner and the Chrysler the loser? Government picking the winners and losers, that sounds more like a centrally planed Soviet economy than free market capitalism. |
Oh well, we told you time and time again what this community organizer was all about. Better book those flights to China. |
On AIG and Bonuses |
Author: Rory B. Bellows |
Everyone is up in arms over AIG paying $165 million in bonuses. Outrage is the coin of the realm in Washington, D.C., bu no one considers what taking this outrage over these bonuses to their natural conclusion means. These bonuses are contractual obligations. If these bonuses were not paid, the recipients would have an iron clad case in court to get them. If Washington stops these bonuses it means contracts are meaningless. The sate could step in and cancel any agreement it wished. The only thing that now matters is your ability to curry favor with politicians because the state has the guns and the legal monopoly on force. And make no mistake, force is the only way to get AIG to stop these bonus payments they are obligated to make. |
The outrage from Chairman Hussein is to get people to forget that it was his administration that allowed this to happen on their watch because they didn’t write the bailout provisions is such a way that prevented tax payer monies from going towards bonuses. Once again, Secretary Geithner got caught with his pants down. The only reason AIG had the money to pay out these bonuses is because Chairman Obama bailed them out. |
when the phone rings in the night |
by bam |
nowhere in the manual, the one they forgot to send home from the baby hospital, does it mention that 5-year-olds on a road trip for the very first time might wake up in the middle of the night, in some faraway motel room, and start breathing in short little puff-puff-puffs that further in the manual might be diagnosed as hyperventilating. |
well, children don’t follow manuals, forgotten or otherwise. |
children, when they’re non-fictional, toss and turn, according to the one who dialed the phone in the middle of the night last night, until finally they call out in the darkness, proclaim that their head is hot, and their tummy rumbly, and they want to talk to their mommy. |
and so, at 2:38 a.m., the phone rings. |
your dream, in which you are chasing baby chickens around your city-girl friend’s apartment–hmm, paging dr. freud, paging dr. freud–is interrupted. |
you are, in those murky first few seconds of a middle-of-a-dream phone call, scrambling the synapses in your brain like some combination bicycle lock where the numbers must line up in just the right sequence, trying to figure out, of all the possible things that could be wrong, just what one it is that is precipitating someone to call you when the clock quite clearly is flashing 2-3-8, with a colon there between the 2 and the 3. |
then, you hear it. you hear the pathetic little whimpering, muffled through the static of a cell phone, a cell phone far away. |
but you are the mother of that whimper, and you’d know it anywhere. you know it now. even in the dark. even bounced from earth to heaven, back to earth, or however it is those dang phones get the whimper to your ear. |
you get a minute or two of explaining, deep background from the dialer, and then the whimperer takes phone in hand and holds it back no longer. |
suddenly it is 2:42 a.m. and you are hearing no words really, just the sound of sadness. supreme sadness. supreme i-feel-crummy-and-i-am-in-a-comfort-suite-in-the-middle-of-south-bend-indiana. |
and you, now wide awake like a mama bear who hears a rustle outside her cave, you are ministering to what ails him, but really you are talking to a silver plastic box, a box with little holes punched in it. |
you are not cheek-to-soft-pink-cheek with the little one you love. you are not stroking his brow, the way you always do, the way your mother did to you. |
you are doing the very best you can but there are two hours, at least, of city and cornfields between you and the so-sad boy. |
and even if you could, even if you jumped in the car right then and there, it would be nuts to head out for the motel just off the interstate, in the middle of a strip mall with a starbucks planted right next door. |
so you pretend you are right there. you use your words to fill in the empty space between you and the phone and him. you are clear, and you are full of promise. you get him to slow his breathing, to get a little sleep, and then come home. he whimpers yes, to all of the above. |
but, like waves of tummy flipping that will not be quelled, the calls keep coming. updates from there at the faraway sickbed. 2:53, they are moving to the couch. 3:07, it was better now it’s worse. |
then, at last, at 3:19, a call comes, telling you the little guy is fast asleep. on the couch. wet washcloth to his head. |
and you too, the caller says, should try to sleep. |
but you’re a mother, and you’ve been roused, and it might not be so easy to get back to chasing chickens there in your dreams. |
the last thing you expected when you laid your head on that old pillow was that you’d be shaken from your sleep by a little boy all knotted in his sheets 110 miles away. |
but, really, that’s the part of being a mama that takes your breath away. it is a roller coaster ride without a seat belt. it’s full of yelps and whoops, and heaven only knows what’s around the bend. |
it’s messy business. it is groping in the dark. fumbling for the phone. it is, since it comes without instructions, making it up as you go. bumping into walls, but somehow putting one foot in front of the other. at least on a good day. |
and the whole time, we are led by one fat muscle that will not stop. will not stop its lub-dub squeezing, letting go. |
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