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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (753167)	11/16/2013 3:14:56 PM
From: Joe Btfsplk	2 Recommendations Recommended By Jorj X Mckie miraje Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1579680

national conservative network...........while coordinating across states to push a hard-right agenda You poor, dessicated little turd. What morons call a hard right agenda is a recipe for recovery, then widespread long term happiness.

To: koan who wrote (753167)

11/16/2013 3:18:45 PM

From: Brumar89

1 Recommendation

Recommended By
TideGlider

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1579680

Matt Damon puts foot in mouth

Matt Damon: 'I'd Eat My Shoe If Jeb Could Name a Bush That Ever Even Walked Into a Public School'

By Noel Sheppard | November 16, 2013 | 14:48

As NewsBusters reported, former Florida governor Jeb Bush pounded public school activist Matt Damon in August for putting his kids in private school.

Damon gave CNN's Jake Tapper a rather lame excuse for this in an online segment of their interview Friday while claiming, "I'd eat my shoe if he could name a Bush that ever even walked into a public school" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

[iframe width="500" height="281" title="MRC TV video player" src="http://www.mrctv.org/embed/124088" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""][/iframe]

JAKE TAPPER, HOST: Does that just come with the territory? I mean, I know actors can be, you know, used to criticism when it comes to your talents or cast in a movie. But when it comes to activism and ideas, it might be different.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, yeah, no, I think I…

TAPPER: Well, people said, “Well, you send your kids to private school. Why are you even involved in this?”

DAMON: Well, because I, you know, because I want the public schools to, if they were, if they went back to, if I could find my, the private school that I send my kids to is the thing closest to the public school that I went to that I could find. And that’s why I send my kids to private school. I wish I didn't have to, it’s expensive, and I also want my kids to be part of a, you know, their local community, you know, and not have to commute to somewhere else to go to school.

And that’s likely why most people send their kids to private schools: because the quality of public schools in most areas is so poor.

As such, Damon was perfectly illustrating the liberal credo of “Do As I Say, NOT As I Do!”

But there was more:

TAPPER: I don’t mean to bear down on your kids, I just…

DAMON: No, no, no, no, because that was a criticism, I think it was Jeb Bush who tweeted that, and then retracted it pretty quickly. Although I'd eat my shoe if he could name a Bush that ever even walked into a public school, but that’s another story. But, but no, I…

TAPPER: You might have to eat your shoe. I’m sure.

DAMON: Really? Maybe I will. Billy Bush, maybe he’ll call me up, “Man, I went to public school.”

Heck with Billy Bush.

The Miami Herald reported in 2002 that Jeb Bush initially attended the public Grady Elementary School in Houston before mother Barbara enrolled him in the private Kincaid Schoolcloser to where they lived.

Brother George W. attended public schools in Midland, Texas - Sam Houston Elementary and San Jacinto Junior High - before being enrolled at Kincaid when the family moved to Houston.

As such, would you like some salt for that shoe, Mr. Damon?

Read more: newsbusters.org

To: koan who wrote (753167)	11/18/2013 4:19:57 PM
From: average joe	2 Recommendations Recommended By joseffy TideGlider Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1579680

Koan you are suffering from irrational fears. Here are some quotes to give you solace. "We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God. Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government. No society can survive the socialist fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them. Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other's. Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously. There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it...The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy. Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice." Christendom might quite reasonably have been alarmed if it had not been attacked. But as a matter of history it had been attacked. The Crusader would have been quite justified in suspecting the Moslem even if the Moslem had merely been a new stranger; but as a matter of history he was already an old enemy. The critic of the Crusade talks as if it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in the interior of Thibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded. They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost ridden into Paris. G.K. Chesterton In *The Meaning of the Crusade*, 1920"

To: koan who wrote (753167)	11/21/2013 11:05:47 AM
From: average joe	1 Recommendation Recommended By TideGlider Respond to of 1579680

College students who cheated on a simple task were more likely to want government jobs, researchers from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania found in a study of hundreds of students in Bangalore, India. Their results, recently released as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, suggest that one of the contributing forces behind government corruption could be who gets into government work in the first place. For instance, "if people have the view that jobs in government are corrupt, people who are honest might not want to get into that system," said Rema Hanna, an associate professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. To combat that problem, governments may need to find new ways to screen people seeking jobs, she said. Researchers ran a series of experiments with more than 600 students finishing up college in India. In one task, students had to privately roll a die and report what number they got. The higher the number, the more they would get paid. Each student rolled the die 42 times. Although researchers do not know for sure if any one student lied, they could tell whether the numbers each person reported were wildly different from what would turn up randomly - in other words, whether there were a suspiciously high number of 5s and 6s in their results. Cheating seemed to be rampant: More than a third of students had scores that fell in the top 1 percent of the predicted distribution, researchers found. Students who apparently cheated were 6.3 percent more likely to say they wanted to work in government, the researchers found. "Overall, we find that dishonest individuals - as measured by the dice task - prefer to enter government service," wrote Hanna and co-author Shing-yi Wang, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. They added, "Importantly, we show that cheating on this task is also predictive of fraudulent behaviors by real government officials." The same test, given to a smaller set of government nurses, showed that those who appear to have cheated with the dice were also more likely to skip work. Previous studies suggest that the bulk of such absenteeism is fraudulent, Hanna said. Researchers also ran other tests to gauge character: In another experiment, students played a game in which they could send a message anonymously to another player, either telling them honestly what move would earn them more money, or dishonestly nudging them toward a worse choice. Tricking the other student would help them gain more money. A third test asked students to divide up a sum of rupees between themselves and a charity of their choice; for each rupee they chose to donate, the amount given to charity would double. Still other tests measured their memory and cognitive ability, or quizzed students about whether they would cheat on exams or believed that most businesses paid bribes. Their findings differed from test to test: In the charity test, keeping more rupees for themselves was more common among government worker wannabes. However, lying during the message game seemed to have no correlation with whether students wanted to go into government work. Researchers speculated that the difference between that game and the dice test, both of which measure dishonesty, could be that students felt differently about stealing from other students than "the experimenters" who ran the dice game. Hanna added that it's harder to tell if a particular person cheated during the dice game, which might affect their actions. Surveying people about corruption also did little to predict whether people were prone to lie in real life, the researchers concluded - a troubling finding for governments that have folded such questions into job screening. Nor did ability seem to make a difference. Complaints of corruption have stirred up past scandals in India, which ranked 94th out of 176 countries and territories in perceived corruption, according to a Transparency International index. Hanna said she was curious whether the same results turn up in other countries where government workers get higher wages and corruption is seen as less of a problem. ©2013 Los Angeles Times Distributed by MCT Information Services