News Stories

[AnimeFan188]

House committee: security requests denied in Libya:

"Despite two explosions and dozens of other security threats, U.S. officials in
Washington turned down repeated pleas from American diplomats in Libya to
increase security at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi where the U.S. ambassador
was killed, Republican leaders of a House committee asserted Tuesday.

In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Chairman Darrell Issa and
Rep. Jason Chaffetz of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee said
their information came from "individuals with direct knowledge of events in Libya."

Issa, R-Calif. and Chaffetz, R-Utah said the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi that killed
Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans was the latest in a long
line of attacks on Western diplomats and officials in Libya in the months before
Sept. 11.

The letter listed 13 incidents, but Chaffetz said in an interview there were more
than 50. Two of them involved explosive devices: a June 6 blast that blew a hole
in the security perimeter. The explosion was described to the committee as "big
enough for forty men to go through"; and an April 6 incident where two Libyans
who were fired by a security contactor threw a small explosive device over the
consulate fence."

See:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...c23e29597451d8


All that, and still no increase in security? Heads should roll for this.

[Anh_Minh]

Originally Posted by Xellos-_^

that is nothing, try this

What happened to just using oil futures? That's what they're for.

[Sumeragi]

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

What happened to just using oil futures? That's what they're for.

Airlines are incompetent. What do you expect?

[ganbaru]

^ Worse than that; greedy and opportunist.

[Sumeragi]

I'll opt for incompetence rather than the "greedy" bias quite a few people seem to have.

[Anh_Minh]

Yeah, I'll go for incompetence too. It probably costs them more to come up with a new, complicated pricing scheme and manage it than it would to just use financial tools for the very purpose they were created for.

[Vexx]

The number of executives I've run into in my corporate life .... greedy AND incompetent usually describes them, sometimes they're also just jackass mean.

I've run into more than one that actually got visibly excited about firing someone who made a mistake.

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

What happened to just using oil futures? That's what they're for.

What? Since when is it my fault that we small-time traders hedge on them? It is the market's fault for being irrational themselves!

Another thing : oil companies buy oil futures themselves so they can control the price of oil they supply to a certain region. It is more of a case of dog-eat-dog between the mega corps.

Originally Posted by Vexx

The number of executives I've run into in my corporate life .... greedy AND incompetent usually describes them, sometimes they're also just jackass mean.

I've run into more than one that actually got visibly excited about firing someone who made a mistake.

To these people, being able to fire someone means that there is an opportunity to scapegoat someone for their faults.

I don't see anything wrong with greed - that is what drove us to learn our trades and to make money from it.

But there is a limit to greed; and the inability to handle it is wholly caused by a substantial knowledge in the trade; namely incompetence. Being able to wave hands and being able to put something durable and useful together with them are the main indicators of whether this person is good at work or not.

[ganbaru]

Originally Posted by Vexx

I've run into more than one that actually got visibly excited about firing someone who made a mistake.

Should we call thoses ''Romney-like individuals'' ?

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by ganbaru

Should we call thoses ''Romney-like individuals'' ?

I doubt Romney would even acknowledge that he even made a mistake.

[Anh_Minh]

Romney doesn't fire people. He has people for that. In China.

[ganbaru]

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

Romney doesn't fire people. He has people for that. In China.

Didn't he said before than he enjoyed firing peoples than gived him service ?

[Mr Hat and Clogs]

Wasn't there a study that showed most executives to be sociopaths anyway.

[TinyRedLeaf]

Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) changed how we think about culture

The Marxist historian reclaimed and popularised the value of popular culture,
something so integral to our lives today it seems bizarre it was ever denigrated.

London (Oct 2): The historian Eric Hobsbawm, who has died aged 95, is rightly being mourned as a great intellectual of modern times. Yet Hobsbawm was more than a powerful historian and political thinker; nor should he be remembered in solitary splendour. He was part of a group of British Marxist scholars who profoundly influenced our understanding of what culture is.

More than 50 years ago, a bunch of dissident Oxbridge-educated academic historians changed the way the British saw culture. They understood, long before anyone else, that culture is what shapes the world. They also saw that culture is totally democratic and comes from the people.

Culture, in the tradition of social analysis that took its lead from Karl Marx, was seen as a secondary and superficial aspect of human life. The economic base, according to the old Marxists, determines everything else; art and literature merely reflect that economic base.

Hobsbawm was one of a generation of brilliant British historians, along with EP Thompson and Christopher Hill, who embraced Marxism but rejected its crude attitude to culture.

Hobsbawm excelled at revealing the power of myths, symbols and rituals, the intricacies of popular culture. He coined the terms "social bandits" and "primitive rebels", to describe forgotten figures who had become outlaws in order to resist their oppressors – Robin Hood, for instance.

In his four-volume history of the modern world, Hobsbawm departs almost completely from Marxist attitudes to culture. He celebrates cinema and modernist art as powerful cultural forces, ones he doesn't even attempt to reduce to economic determinants.

Why did Marxists like Hobsbawm influence our understanding of culture? Because they wrote about it so well. In their books there is a powerful sense of culture as an endlessly creative field of play, where people build and destroy utopias every day.

These men set out the expansive, democratic sense of culture we take for granted today, demonstrating that the rough music of the poor can be more eloquent than the duke's landscaped garden.

GUARDIAN

[sa547]

What is Republic Act 10175, also known as the Philippine Cybercrime Prevention Law of 2012?

http://www.gov.ph/2012/09/12/republic-act-no-10175/

(4) Libel. — The unlawful or prohibited acts of libel as defined in Article 355 of the Revised Penal Code, as amended, committed through a computer system or any other similar means which may be devised in the future.

The very vague libel provision in the new law could bring an offender to a prison sentence up to 12 YEARS, while in other countries the penalties are limited to paying for damages.

Now that is NOT FUN.

[flying ^]

woah... there's more to Fast & Furious ATF/DOJ boondoggle than initially thought.

(from close caption)


Univision had (exclusive) access to the list of serial numbers for weapons used in Fast and Furous and to the list of guns seized in MX. After cross-referencing both lists it became clear that at least a hundred of them were used in crimes of all kinds.

We found 57 weapons that were not mentioned in congress' investigation.

[ganbaru]

"Critical but stable" world nods at more risk
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...89206F20121003

Intelligence effort named citizens, not terrorists
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-03-02-36-15
Not so much of a surprise here.

[Paranoid Android]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle4583591/

Toronto spending $300,000 to remove existing bike lanes.

[ganbaru]

They really made a big mistake electing their current mayor...

[AnimeFan188]

MPAA Chief Says SOPA, PIPA ‘Are Dead’:

"Former Sen. Christopher Dodd, now chairman of the Motion Picture Association of
America, said the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act aren’t going to be
floated again in Congress.

“These bills are dead. They are not coming back,” Dodd told the Commonwealth
Club in San Francisco late Tuesday. He served 30 years as a Democratic senator
from Connecticut, so he’s obviously in the know."

See:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ays-sopa-dead/