Posted on July 16th, 2008 at 10:39 am by Steve
Just found this 2007 article from Forbes magazine listing the 25 largest fictional companies, by estimated 2007 revenue. Good for a chuckle or two.
Just found this 2007 article from Forbes magazine listing the 25 largest fictional companies, by estimated 2007 revenue. Good for a chuckle or two.
Executive Summary:
Details, courtesy of Glenn Greenwald:
Since that overwhelming Democratic victory, this is what the Democratic-led Congress has done:
- Repeatedly funded — at the White House’s insistence — the Iraq War without conditions;
- Defeated — at the White House’s insistence — Jim Webb’s bill to increase the intervals between deployments for U.S. troops;
- Defeated — at the White House’s insistence — a bill to restore habeas corpus, which had been abolished by the Military Commissions Act, enacted before the 2006 election with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous GOP support;
- Enacted — at the White House’s insistence and with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous Republican support
— the so-called Protect America Act, vesting the President with extreme new warrantless eavesdropping powers;
- Overwhelmingly approved the Senate’s Kyl-Lieberman Resolution, to declare parts of the Iranian Government a “terrorist organization,” an extremely belligerent resolution modeled after those which made “regime change” the official U.S. Government position towards Iraq;
- Deleted from a pending bill — at the direction of the House Democratic leadership and at the insistence of the White House — a provision merely to require Congressional approval before the Bush administration can attack Iran;
- Overwhelmingly enacted — at the White House’s insistence, and with substantial Democratic and virtually unanimous GOP support — the “FISA Amendments Act of 2008,” to vest the President with broad new warrantless eavesdropping powers and to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, all but putting an end to any chance for a real investigation and judicial adjudication of the Bush administration’s illegal NSA spying program;
- Confirmed, with the indispensable support of two key Democratic Senators, Bush’s nominee for Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, despite his support for radical Bush theories of executive power and his refusal to oppose torture;
- Stood by passively and impotently while Bush officials flagrantly ignored their Subpoenas and refused to comply with their investigations.
Delightfully summarizing so much that is wrong with contemporary western capitalism, psychology, and industry:
“For most of our history, we’ve sold newer and better products for habits that already existed,” said Dr. [Carol] Berning, the Proctor & Gamble psychologist. “But about a decade ago, we realized we needed to create new products. So we began thinking about how to create habits for products that had never existed before.”
…when Dick Cheney is smiling:
I won’t even bother going into the details of the disastrous FISA legislation that was passed this week. Cheney’s smirk tells you everything you need to know.
Georgetown Law professor Marty Lederman sums it up thusly:
The new statute permits the NSA to intercept phone calls and e-mails between the U.S. and a foreign location, without making any showing to a court and without judicial oversight, whether or not the communication has anything to do with al Qaeda — indeed, even if there is no evidence that the communication has anything to do with terrorism, or any threat to national security.
If you want all the details, Glenn Greenwald has them, as usual.
I ran across this interesting debate between a scientist and Conservapedia sparked by research showing that bacteria had evolved to process new types of food in a long running study. It’s well written and you can get the main points in the first few paragraphs so I won’t paraphrase:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/conservapedias-evolutionary-foibles.ars/1
So… I was wondering… who is going to start Liberalapedia? I think it would be hard to argue that this is what Wikipedia is given the number of contributors compared to the number of contributors to Conservapedia. And, if Liberalapedia is the opposite of Conservapedia I don’t want anything to do with it.