If she signed a confidentiality agreement then I guess it didn't stick. It doesn't seem so confidential now, or we wouldn't know that she got a years salary to sign it now would we?
I guess when the man is running for president, then all bets are off, and now its time for another black man to be lynched in public, eh? My concern is not Cain's handling of it, its the fact that this information is public at all. When it comes to politics, I guess people don't have to follow the contracts they sign.
My feeling is this IS all a straw-man to hide the weaknesses in Cain's policies, as AG alludes. Defamation of character is way easier to deal with than fundamental weaknesses in the man's platform on real issues.
An obsolescent society breeds an obsolescent mind-set. Also, in such a volatile world people seek a sense of security that is illusory. Having a backup plan is what we're taught. Not putting all of our eggs in one basket as the cliche states.
I also think its sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our fears create our reality. What we resist, persists, so to speak.
All Koans are nonsense on the surface. The implied paradox is what is important to the enlightenment contained within. Trite and pat answers to such an infinite regression are thereby missing the whole point, and no wisdom is gained from such platitudinous solutions.
We are not computers to get locked into a logical loop. Intuition is what saves us from this infinite loop. At some point we go, "Both!" and move beyond the words and accept the balance between the polarites that is the "Now".
What came first is not important. What comes next isn't either. What is happening right now is where wisdom lies.
Underneath the disk of the world are four elephants supporting the disk. Underneath the elephants is a giant turtle. What's underneath the turtle?
I'm not scrolling back to find it. Currently there are no "laws" on the federal books, as Roe vs. Wade is not a legislative law, its a Judicial edict.
I don't like edicts coming from SCOTUS or POTUS. Having a bill pass through a legislative body and become law at least ensures everyone's opinion is represented in the debate. Edicts are just that; dictatorial.
When a flock of Iberian butterflies take wing simultaneously, causing such drastic changes in the weather that Noah's flood will look like a weekly visit to the community swimming pool.
One of the most talented grumpy people ever to sit in front of a camera, Andy was a staple for my Sunday evenings growing up. Long before the investigative journalism and exposes of "60 Minutes" mattered to me, or for that matter, made any sense to me as a child, Andy's grumbling grandfatherly soliloquies amused, inspired, and provoked thought for more than half my life. I will miss you Andy.
Ah. Labor Unions are the problem IMO, at least in the US. The whole reason imports are necessary (vis-a-vis Walmart) is because the unions have made the prospect of producing even simple to produce products here not worth the money. Not when there is a sizable labor pool overseas that can do the same for less.
Something my father told me back when he was alive: When the guy making the car makes $20/hr and the guy buying the car makes $10/hr and he's a professional (lawyer/doctor/etc.), there is a problem with this picture.
$16 muffins pays for a lot of minimum wage workers.
And it goes back to fostered dependence of the codependency endemic to government programs. I have never seen a government truly willing to empower its citizens. Empowered citizens have no need for government.
This isn't a bad idea. I like it. However, in America, this would cause a conflict of interest with our penal system, wherein a large portion of these community services are performed by inmates of minimum security facilities (ie. DUI convicts, etc.)
In a truly free market (of which, none exists, I know), labor is a commodity like anything else, subject to supply and demand curves. The reason there are low-paying jobs is because they are largely unskilled labor positions, making the supply of workers nearly unlimited, and thus the demand curve intersects at a lower wage.
To artificially regulate this relationship through a minimum wage law hurts everyone, because the backlash from market pressures is felt throughout the system. Higher wages for unskilled labor is passed of in the form of higher prices for the goods and services involved.
Higher prices for inelastic (meaning less available substitutes) goods and services means less disposable income over all. Minimum wage laws decrease the standard of living for everyone involved.
Let the market determine the wage and spend the money involved in regulation and enforcement on training and education so unskilled laborers become skilled laborers and can thus increase their value through value adding to their skills.
Propping up a huge labor pool of largely ignorant individuals through minimum wage laws doesn't help increase the standard of living for anyone. Its a form of codependent enablement that ignores the more basic need for adding value to a persons skillset.
It depends on what you're trying to accomplish in a song. There are several formulas for writing music.
The one I tend to use the most is similar to Wagner's idea of a Leitmotif. I tend to write blues songs so I write musical passages that are a question, followed by a similar but variant passage that is formulated as an answer.
Ex.:
Q: What kind of woman Breaks a heart so well? A: A cold-hearted woman, Take a poor man to hell.
Its hard to represent the music that is associated with this passage in text, but if you think of the rhythm that is behind the passage it goes something like this (' being an accented syllable, - being unaccented)
What kind of woman breaks a heart so well? ' - - ' - ' - ' - -
A cold-hearted woman, take a poor man to hell. - ' - - ' - ' - ' - - '
The accents are fairly arbitrary, and follow the accents that the musician crafts within in his own mind. That is part of why song-writing is an art. That's also why songs and poetry are two different disciplines, as tonal and duration metrics and qualities in music can be lengthened or contracted to fit the artists vision far more flexibly than what is available in poetry.
This is why rap is not the same as a full-on song, as rap is fairly monotone in tonal quality but plays with the rhythmic qualities of duration.
He did not fix anything, least of all our healthcare. He focused on "Obamacare" rather than the economy when he had a chance to do something with a partisan majority in Congress, he went further into debt to legislate a "stimulus" that didn't "stimulate" anything, and prior to being president he was a do-nothing senator that voted mostly "present" when he voted at all.
For his age and "first time in office" he did a lot of egotistical micro-managing rather than listen to anyone else's opinions and then blamed all his mistakes on those "mean GOP'ers".
I gave him a chance in the beginning. I have seen nothing to warrant a second term in office.
Further, I have more right as a citizen of the US to criticize him than you do as a foreign national to support him.
"When every other country wants the best and the brightest, we're trying to keep them out. It doesn't make a lot of sense. ... he truth of the matter is we are sending the future overseas," Bloomberg told ABC News today. "We need people to start companies and create jobs. People that come from overseas are something like ... five times more likely to create jobs than people who are here. ... So we've got to do something about this."
Highly educated people applying for legal residency in America to create start up businesses (jobs!) are not allowed but unskilled illegals that can even speak English are (by the millions!). Bureaucracy is killing this country.
According to local news, Occupy Portland has a new iPhone app that the people can purchase to get the message out. There's sticking it to the corporations. Buying their apps.
I don't depend on any paper or media outlet for any news, actually, as they all cater to the needs of the "hated" 1% and their agendas. I made a contribution to the thread that clarified the constituency of the supposed 99% that are being touted as the beneficiaries of these protests.
Until they can actually proliferate a coherent message beyond "Capitalism bad!" then I don't think they'll be all that effective beyond a sideshow entertainment piece.
What sort of capitalism is bad? IMO crony capitalism, kleptocracy, and market manipulation skewed to oppress small business in favor of "too big to fail" types of endeavors. Corporations as personhoods devoid of the personal responsibility standards that so-called adults are held to.
Conservative types are always ranting about how without corporations we wouldn't have cell-phones, TV, cars, or internet, but...
Henry Ford was a capitalist that realized that profit wasn't everything; if you don't pay your workers enough to buy the products you produce, soon you have no profit at all. But then, Henry Ford wasn't a globalist who's interests are in creating substandard products subject to weekly recalls for dangerous qualities that only serve the top 1% in terms of profit.
There was a time when capitalists believed in offering quality products for a quality profit. Now everyone wants something for nothing, or Madoff would not have been so successful for so long.
Get it through your thick skulls people. There's no such thing as a free lunch. You want these 1%er's to give back what they've taken. You will have to sacrifice, and sacrifice alot, to get what you want, because they're not in a position where they have to anymore. And that's the consumer's fault, settling for Walmart quality at Walmart prices.
Galactic_bodhi Forum Posts (9,196)
RE: Herman Cain
If she signed a confidentiality agreement then I guess it didn't stick. It doesn't seem so confidential now, or we wouldn't know that she got a years salary to sign it now would we?I guess when the man is running for president, then all bets are off, and now its time for another black man to be lynched in public, eh? My concern is not Cain's handling of it, its the fact that this information is public at all. When it comes to politics, I guess people don't have to follow the contracts they sign.
My feeling is this IS all a straw-man to hide the weaknesses in Cain's policies, as AG alludes. Defamation of character is way easier to deal with than fundamental weaknesses in the man's platform on real issues.