You’re being too nice, the description then & now should read ‘fucking pigs’. Welcome to ameriKKKa.

Thanks, Kip, Bruce & BevW, yet another interesting salon. I wish I’d gotten an answer to my “is all cargo screened” question as the last thing I heard was it was not which makes all this TSA security theater crap a sick joke at best…

Two quickies for Kip and/or Bruce -
1)Is every commercial flight in the US using bag matching for every traveler? (i.e. every checked bag is associated with someone who boarded the plane, I know they do this in Europe)
2)Is every bit of cargo destined for a commercial flight now inspected & X-rayed?

Thanks Paul, Knut & Bev for an excellent book salon, I’ll definitely put it on my to-read list. One thing I didn’t see in the above discussion was the acute political angle, the r’s have had but one goal since 2008 which was to make Obama’s a failed presidency. This goal accelerated in 2010. Granted, Obama has done a lot of foolish things and listened to far too many of the wrong people (while ignoring the few like Paul who have actually been correct) but the sheer naked hatred from the r’s side of the aisle is a big factor in why there’s no recovery for the 99%.

cocktailhag!

If there really are ‘swing voters’ they swing from mid-right to hard-right, the only undecideds in this race are those that are either going to vote for dems or not vote at all. IMHO w/the status quo, they are not going to vote in 2012. They were the margin in 2008. I’m a long-time voter but I’m not voting for a president in 2012, first time ever. Why should they vote at all? Like their vote will make a difference?

This has always been a violent war-making nation since Europeans first settled here. Always. The country was built on genocide and slavery. I’m not sure much has changed

Agree, but the current degree of brutality & sadism has not been official policy since the early 1900s. We used to prosecute people for war crimes! Whoever thinks the USA version of humanity is capable of being thoughtful or enlightened is a deluded fool. There is a pox upon us all.

Shit, I am a citizen of the same country this Rodriguez psychopath claims to serve???? This is not the country I was raised in, something changed. Hate Talk radio? Sometimes being old & childless is a blessing…

Yet Bush’s base (the ‘have mores’) absolutely despise Obama…

David, that’s $10 million, not $10 billion!

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has received 25,600 petitions for H-1B visas since April 2, nearly twice as many as it received for the entire first month of last year’s application period

Maybe that’s good news for the economy but it really blows for the skilled workers here – the companies asking for those H-1B visas want to pay their immigrant engineers less than half of what they would pay engineers who are US citizens. Even better, the immigrants can’t complain, ask for more money or quit as in doing any of those would result in them losing their job and thus losing their visa. What I’d like to see is a list of companies who employ the H-1B folks and what exactly is so ‘special’ about their skills compared to US citizens. BTW 10 years ago I would see ads seeking engineers with masters degrees & 5+ years experience in bleeding-edge tech. The kicker? The employer was offering $25K/year. Since no US citizen engineer would take that as the going rate at the time for engineers w/batchelors degrees was $50K-$80K, the employer would then request an H-1B for the position.

I’ve read that for a $100 barrel of oil, $20-$30 (or more) is taken by non end-user speculators. This is the first article I found. It also says

“Prior to the 1990s, speculators made up about 30 percent of the futures market. In the latest reporting period, the ratio on May 3 stood at 68 percent speculators to 32 percent users of oil.”

It was printed in 2011.

Nothing ‘conservative’ here, 100% right-wing authoritarian.

Primatene Mist is still on the market despite being warned by the FDA for years to remove the CFCs from their asthma inhalers.

Yet all the formerly generic prescription-only albuterol inhalers have been reformulated as CFC-free products. But given that Primatene Mist in its CFC version is still available, it’s now obvious the only reason this was done was to enable a fresh patent on these formerly generic products and thus raise the price from ~5.00 to over $100. Folks, we live in a nation of outright crooks and it’s way past time to occupy their asses. As to the inhalers, years ago I switched to a nebulizer machine & the albuterol for it is still generic, $5 buys a large box of ampules thus not to ‘feed the beast’.

Not having children & graduating HS back in ’74 means I don’t really know what public education looks like these days. Personally my own schooling was crap back then in many ways (we’ll just skip this chapter on trigonometry…) and I know it’s much worse these days, but at least I had the tools to track down things that interested me. I keep thinking that a lot of today’s problem came about precisely because of a right-wing authoritarian agenda to destroy public education under the guise of ‘reform’.

Thanks to you & Jonathan for an interesting book salon.

Jonathan/Spocko,
Do you think the right-wing policies of damaging public education over the last 30+ years have helped the media dumb down & propagandize instead of informing? NCLB & the endless standardized testing not to mention the decimation of the curricula leaves people ignorant & uninformed making them much easier to lie to. Especially to those who don’t know their history. Thoughts?

In answer to the original question, not “no”, “F*ck no”. And them having asked that, damn their eyes if I ever were to work there, I’d rather starve.