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This one ain't a joke:
Cheney's Halliburton stock options rose 3,281% last year
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Cheneys_stock_options_rose_3281_last_1011.html
GSHF letter to shareholder
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/051011/115690.html?.v=1
INSEQ Releases Shareholder Letter
Tuesday October 11, 10:22 am ET
MOUNT ARLINGTON, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 11, 2005--INSEQ Corporation (OTC Bulletin Board: INSQ - News) chairman, Kevin Kreisler, issued the following correspondence to its shareholders today:
Dear Shareholders:
A number of exciting developments have occurred since our last communication that we view as critical to our ongoing development and growth. These developments include the following:
* The execution of an agreement to acquire Independent Metal Sales, Inc., which will bring INSEQ to an estimated $21 million in annualized revenue and $2.1 million in EBITDA;
* The execution of a letter of intent to acquire a Specialty Metal Manufacturer ("SMM"), which is expected to add another $2 million in annualized revenue with better than 10% EBITDA;
* The completion of INSEQ's acquisition of Separation and Recovery Technologies, Inc. ("SRT") which holds the rights to a new patented technology developed by Argonne National Laboratory under a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy that preferentially separates plastics from mixed plastic wastes;
* The execution of manufacturing agreements with Ethanol Oil Recovery Systems, LLC, Mean Green BioFuels Corporation, Ovation Products Corporation, and Tornado Trash Corporation, each of which agreements call for the first refusal rights relative to INSEQ's manufacturing of equipment and appliances based on each of their respective patented and proprietary green technologies;
* The execution of Strategic Alliances with Sterling Planet, Inc., and TerraPass, Inc., under which agreements INSEQ will sell RECs and TerraPasses through INSEQ's planned new secondary commodities exchange;
* The execution of a Green Technology Prototyping and Manufacturing Agreement with GreenShift Industrial Design Corporation ("GIDC") through which INSEQ will manufacture and distribute GIDC's planned line of residential and commercial recycling and waste reduction appliances and equipment;
* The execution of a sub-license agreement with GIDC for certain applications of Ovation Product Corporation's proprietary new water purification appliance, under which INSEQ plans to develop and sell appliances for the purification and reuse of waste kitchen and bath water, not including septic wastes, for a number of markets including the food services, hospitality, and residential markets; and,
* The restructuring of our various debentures and the cancellation of about 350 million shares of INSEQ common stock and warrants exercisable into 300 million shares of INSEQ common stock at $0.001 per share.
INSEQ's business model is based on activities where the Company directly facilitates the more efficient use of natural resources. Its strategy includes the manufacturing and sale of equipment and appliances based on proprietary green technologies, the distribution of primary and secondary commodities, direct production as appropriate of selected metals, chemicals, plastics and fuels, and various forms of technology licensing.
INSEQ has recently executed an amendment to its Green Technology Prototyping and Manufacturing Agreement with GIDC to include a blanket sub-license to GIDC's package of existing and new green technologies, including GIDC's Tornado Generator(TM) and water purification technologies. This is an important development because INSEQ plans to directly use relevant technologies to accelerate returns on its investments in future acquisitions by reducing the targets' operating costs and increasing their sales. If the Company is successful, and it structures its acquisitions with this in mind, it should be able to acquire more companies, assets and earnings with less capital.
On the issue of the Company's capital structure, while we made positive strides during the third quarter with the elimination of about 650 million shares of common stock and warrants, our growth plans require us to seek out new opportunities to achieve similar results. We have accordingly cancelled certain financing agreements, restructured the planned financing for our pending acquisition of Independent Metal Sales, which is slated to close this quarter, and we expect to restructure GreenShift's 70% stake in INSEQ.
GreenShift holds a dilution protected 70% stake in INSEQ that currently amounts to about 3.0 billion shares of INSEQ common stock. GreenShift has agreed to cancel its dilution protections and convert the entirety of its common stock into a new class of preferred stock. This new preferred stock will have a fixed face value equal to 70% of INSEQ's intrinsic value on December 31, 2005. GreenShift's voting rights and dividend preference will remain fixed at 70% until conversion. The new class of preferred stock will be convertible into INSEQ common stock at the lesser of $0.01 per share or 80% of the market price at the time of conversion. The conversion of GreenShift's stake can be expected to decrease INSEQ's common stock outstanding by about 3 billion shares.
I am hopeful that these changes will collectively help to enhance the impact of our pending and targeted new acquisitions and other growth initiatives on our overall shareholder wealth.
We are pleased with INSEQ's progress and we are very enthusiastic about our prospects for growth. We are grateful for your continued support and involvement. I look forward to our next communication.
Best Regards,
Kevin Kreisler
Chairman
INSEQ Corporation
About INSEQ Corporation
INSEQ Corporation is a publicly traded company whose mission is to directly facilitate the efficient utilization of primary and secondary commodities including metals, chemicals, fuels and plastics. More information on INSEQ is available online at www.inseq.com.
INSEQ is 70% owned by GreenShift Corporation (OTC Bulletin Board: GSHF - News), a business development corporation whose mission is to develop and support companies and technologies that facilitate the efficient use of natural resources and catalyze transformational environmental gains.
Safe Harbor Statement
This press release contains statements, which may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Those statements include statements regarding the intent, belief or current expectations of INSEQ Corporation, and members of their management as well as the assumptions on which such statements are based. Prospective investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, and that actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by such forward-looking statements. Important factors currently known to management that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-statements include fluctuation of operating results, the ability to compete successfully and the ability to complete before-mentioned transactions. The company undertakes no obligation to update or revise forward-looking statements to reflect changed assumptions, the statements to reflect changed assumptions, the occurrence of unanticipated events or changes to future operating results.
Contact:
INSEQ Corporation
Jim Grainer, 973-398-8183
Fax: 973-398-8037
investorrelations@inseq.com
www.inseq.com
No wonder you defend bargains, peeker -- I see you rank one step behind him.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=8040566
For someone who so verbosely expresses such an abundance of opinions on such a variety of phenomenon, Mr. Bargain, you reveal yourself to be remarkably ignorant of all of them. In particular, your understanding of free enterprise, liberals, socialism, America and, not least of all, yours truly, ksuave, are uniformly full of krap. And you don’t pick stocks very well, either.
You use the library, Mr. Bargain? Isn't that rather socialistic of you to expect the government to underwrite your reading needs? What kind of American are you? Why don't you support free enterprise and pay retail at Barnes and Noble like our founding fathers intended?
So, when it suits you you'll take government handouts, but then when some worthless shiftless hungry people take that crappy government cheese, you condemn them because you're not hungry (and besides you prefer brie). Gosh, you embody the very spirit that makes America great, Mr. Bargain.
Death to Saddam!
Well said! If I didn't already have a couple of boatloads of the stuff, I too would be buying trucks to load more boats, and I'd stop playing with my rubber ducky and I'd taser myself too!
Well, Len's a plumber's helper.
I've been into emfp deep and for a while but haven't been following this thread; wondering which other stocks discussed here others' favorites right now. TIA . . .
ksuave
Actually, Mr. Tinman, I don't know what you're referring to. I wrote a very brief note about SEHO, a potential zip-code changing homeland security stock, and why I believed the current political climate favors terrorist-related stocks, and two people wrote one-sentence notes agreeing with me. Hardly a communist threat to the nation.
Homeland security stocks, including some zip code changers, are as effected by the politics of terrorism as they are by actual terrorism, and there is a credible threat that the politics surrounding terrorism is currently on the ascent. I'm sorry if my and others' interpretations as to why that is run counter to your own personal biases, Mr. Tinman, but that doesn't make the discussion off-topic.
SEHO up on terrorist threats. As GWB's political woes increase (wait until the Plame indictments come in), the the threat of terrorism will be increasingly emphasized. SEHO will benefit, and, ironically, so will I.
ksuave
It seems it's not just people who the the Board Moderator feels free to call "insane" agree with you, Rogue. From CNN:
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/05/bush.reax/
Wasn't it Ben Franklin who said something like "those that are willing to give up their freedoms for security will get neither"?
Those who are ready to relinquish martial law to neo-cons are neither heartlanders or South Americans; they're Germans . . . good Germans.
'The Authoritarian Personality' Revisited
By ALAN WOLFE
When it first appeared in 1950, The Authoritarian Personality was primed for classic status. It ran to just under 1,000 pages. Its publisher, Harper & Brothers, had brought out Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma six years earlier and drew explicit parallels between the one book and the other. Its authors were, or would soon become, famous. Theodor Adorno, the senior author, was a member of the influential Frankfurt school of "critical theory," a Marxist-inspired effort to diagnose the cultural deformities of late capitalism. R. Nevitt Sanford was a distinguished psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley who, in the year the book was published, would be dismissed from his professorship for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. Else Frenkel-Brunswick had been trained at Freud's University of Vienna and was a practicing lay analyst in Northern California. Twenty-three years old at the time the study began, Daniel J. Levinson would become famous for his 1978 The Seasons of a Man's Life (Knopf), which popularized the notion of a "midlife crisis."
Then there was the subject matter. The Authoritarian Personality addressed itself to the question of whether the United States might harbor significant numbers of people with a "potentially fascistic" disposition. It did so with methods that claimed to represent the cutting edge in social science -- and that's where the book got in trouble with scholars of its day. But in today's political climate, it might be time to revisit its thesis.
Before anyone was talking about the radical right in America -- the John Birch Society, the most notorious of the new conservative groups to develop in the postwar period, wasn't founded until 1958 -- The Authoritarian Personality seemed to anticipate the fervent crusades against communism and the attacks on Chief Justice Earl Warren, the United Nations, and even fluoridation that would characterize postwar politics in the United States. The fact that the radical right has transformed itself from a marginal movement to an influential sector of the contemporary Republican Party makes the book's choice of subject matter all the more prescient.
Finally, the book was filled with data, including its famous "F scale." Based on how respondents answered a series of questions, the F scale identified nine key dimensions of a protofascist personality: conventionality, submissiveness, aggression, subjectivity, superstitiousness, toughness, cynicism, the tendency to project unconscious emotional responses onto the world, and heightened concerns about sex.
For example, subjects were asked how much they disagreed or agreed with such statements as:
"Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn." (Submissiveness.)
"Homosexuality is a particularly rotten form of delinquency and ought to be severely punished." (Aggression and sex.)
"No insult to our honor should ever go unpunished." (Toughness and aggression.)
"No matter how they act on the surface, men are interested in women for only one reason." (Sex and cynicism.)
The F scale was only one of the research methods featured in The Authoritarian Personality. The authors also measured ethnocentrism; administered Thematic Appreciation Tests, presenting subjects with pictures and asking them to tell a story about them; and relied upon clinical interviews resembling psychoanalytic sessions. Rarely, if ever, have social scientists probed ordinary human beings in as much detail as did the book's authors.
Indeed, participating in this study was so demanding for subjects that the authors made no effort to engage in random sampling. They first tried their methods out on college students, the usual captive audience, before getting the cooperation of the leaders of various organizations to survey their groups -- unions, the merchant marine, employment-service veterans, prison inmates, psychology-clinic patients, and PTA's.
Unlike much postwar social science, The Authoritarian Personality did not present data showing the correlations between authoritarianism and a variety of variables such as social class, religion, or political affiliation. Instead the authors tried to draw a composite picture of people with authoritarian leanings: Perhaps their most interesting finding was that such people identify with the strong and are contemptuous of the weak. Extensive case studies of particular individuals were meant to convey the message that people who seemed exceptionally conventional on the outside could be harboring radically intolerant thoughts on the inside.
D espite its bulk, prestigious authors, and seeming relevance, however, The Authoritarian Personality never did achieve its status as a classic. Four years after its publication, it was subject to strong criticism in Studies in the Scope and Method of "The Authoritarian Personality" (Free Press, 1954), edited by the psychologists Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda. Two criticisms were especially devastating, one political, the other methodological.
How, the University of Chicago sociologist Edward A. Shils wanted to know, could one write about authoritarianism by focusing only on the political right? In line with other works of the 1950s, such as Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt, Brace, 1951), Shils pointed out that "Fascism and Bolshevism, only a few decades ago thought of as worlds apart, have now been recognized increasingly as sharing many very important features." The United States had its fair share of fellow travelers and Stalinists, Shils argued, and they too worshiped power and denigrated weakness. Any analysis that did not recognize that the extremes of left and right were similar in their authoritarianism was inherently flawed.
Herbert H. Hyman and Paul B. Sheatsley, survey-research specialists, scrutinized every aspect of The Authoritarian Personality's methodology and found each wanting. Sampling was all but nonexistent. The wording of the questionnaire was flawed. The long, open-ended interviews were coded too subjectively. No method existed for determining what caused what. Whatever the subjects said about themselves could not be verified. The F scale lacked coherence.
It is true that, social science being what it is, fault can be found with any methodology. But the critique by Hyman and Sheatsley in some ways became more famous than the study it analyzed; when I attended graduate school in the 1960s, The Authoritarian Personality was treated as a social-science version of the Edsel, a case study of how to do everything wrong.
Perhaps Adorno had all that coming. Along with Max Horkheimer, who played an instrumental role in the research that went into the book, Adorno had published Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment) in Amsterdam in 1947. Among its other attacks on the technical rationality of advanced capitalism, that book dismissed "positivism," the effort to model the social sciences on the natural ones. The significant flaws of The Authoritarian Personality allowed quantitative social scientists to return the favor and dismiss critical theory.
Yet despite its flaws, The Authoritarian Personality deserves a re-evaluation. In many ways, it is more relevant now than it was in 1950.
Certainly the criticisms of Edward Shils seem misplaced 50 years on. Communism really did have some of the authoritarian characteristics of fascism, yet Communism is gone from the Soviet Union and without any influence in the United States. Many writers inspired by Shils, like Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who would become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, held that totalitarian regimes, unlike authoritarian ones, were not reformable from within. Yet the Soviet Union collapsed as a result of domestic upheaval. Totalitarianism still exists in a country like North Korea, but in the U.S.S.R. it never was quite as "total" in its control over most of its populations as many postwar scholars maintained. When it collapsed, so did many of the theories that once sought to explain it.
Even more significant than the collapse of left-wing authoritarianism has been the success of right-wing authoritarianism. Perhaps the authors of The Authoritarian Personality were on to something when they made questions about sexuality in general, and homosexuality in particular, so central to diagnosing authoritarianism.
In the June 19, 2005, issue of The New York Times Magazine, the journalist Russell Shorto interviewed activists against gay marriage and concluded that they were motivated not by a defense of traditional marriage, but by hatred of homosexuality itself. "Their passion," Shorto wrote, "comes from their conviction that homosexuality is a sin, is immoral, harms children and spreads disease. Not only that, but they see homosexuality itself as a kind of disease, one that afflicts not only individuals but also society at large and that shares one of the prominent features of a disease: It seeks to spread itself." It is not difficult to conclude where those people would have stood on the F scale.
Not all opponents of gay marriage, of course, are incipient fascists; the left, to its discredit, frequently dismisses the views of conservative opponents on, for example, abortion, church-state separation, or feminism as irrational bigotry, when the conclusions of most people who hold such views stem from deeply held, and morally reasoned, religious convictions. At the same time, many of the prominent politicians successful in today's conservative political environment adhere to a distinct style of politics that the authors of The Authoritarian Personality anticipated. Public figures, in fact, make good subjects for the kinds of analysis upon which the book relied; visible, talkative, passionate, they reveal their personalities to us, allowing us to evaluate them.
Consider the case of John R. Bolton, now our ambassador to the United Nations. While testifying about Bolton's often contentious personality, Carl Ford Jr., a former head of intelligence within the U.S. State Department, called him a "a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy." Surely, in one pithy sentence, that perfectly summarizes the characteristics of those who identify with strength and disparage weakness. Everything Americans have learned about Bolton -- his temper tantrums, intolerance of dissent, and black-and-white view of the world -- step right out of the clinical material assembled by the authors of The Authoritarian Personality.
And Bolton is by no means alone. Sen. John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, last spring said that violent attacks on judges, who cannot be held accountable, were understandable. He might well have scored highly on his response to this item from the F scale: "There are some activities so flagrantly un-American that, when responsible officials won't take the proper steps, the wide-awake citizen should take the law into his own hands." House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is in difficulty for his close ties to lobbyists like Jack Abramoff. Would those men agree with the statement, "When you come right down to it, it's human nature never to do anything without an eye to one's own profit"?
One item on the F scale, in particular, seems to capture in just a few words the way that many Christian-right politicians view the world in an age of terror: "Too many people today are living in an unnatural, soft way; we should return to the fundamentals, to a more red-blooded, active way of life."
If one could find contemporary "authoritarians of the left" to match those on the right, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality could rightly be criticized for their exclusive focus on fascism. Yet there are few, if any, such examples; while Republicans have been moving toward the right, Democrats are shifting to the center. No liberal close to the leaders of the Democratic Party has called for the assassination of a foreign head of state; only a true authoritarian like Pat Robertson, who has helped the Republicans achieve power, has done that.
The authors of The Authoritarian Personality hoped that a clinical account of the tendency would enable democracy to protect itself better against political extremism. That could not be done, they concluded, by changing the personality structure of incipient authoritarians, since their beliefs were too ingrained to be altered and the techniques of psychology, in any case, were too weak to alter them. Authoritarian tendencies, they concluded, "are products of the total organization of society and are to be changed only as that society is changed."
The United States did change in the years after their book was published, but those changes revealed what might have been the biggest mistake the authors made: They looked for subjects among students and union members when they should have been looking in the corridors of power.
Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and professor of political science at Boston College. He is writing a book on whether democracy in America still works.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 52, Issue 7, Page B12
Found some change in the couch . . . put half on MOTG, half on GSHF . . . gonna look at homes uptown later this afternoon.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN
by PAUL RUDNICK
The New Yorker
Issue of 2005-09-26
Day No. 1:
And the Lord God said, “Let there be light,” and lo, there was light. But then the Lord God said, “Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, sunset-at-the-beach, filtered half-light, so that everything else I design will look younger?”
“I’m loving that,” said Buddha. “It’s new.”
“You should design a restaurant,” added Allah.
Day No. 2:
“Today,” the Lord God said, “let’s do land.” And lo, there was land.
“Well, it’s really not just land,” noted Vishnu. “You’ve got mountains and valleys and—is that lava?”
“It’s not a single statement,” said the Lord God. “I want it to say, ‘Yes, this is land, but it’s not afraid to ooze.’ ”
“It’s really a backdrop, a sort of blank canvas,” put in Apollo. “It’s, like, minimalism, only with scale.”
“But—brown?” Buddha asked.
“Brown with infinite variations,” said the Lord God. “Taupe, ochre, burnt umber—they’re called earth tones.”
“I wasn’t criticizing,” said Buddha. “I was just noticing.”
Day No. 3:
“Just to make everyone happy,” said the Lord God, “today I’m thinking oceans, for contrast.”
“It’s wet, it’s deep, yet it’s frothy; it’s design without dogma,” said Buddha, approvingly.
“Now, there’s movement,” agreed Allah. “It’s not just ‘Hi, I’m a planet—no splashing.’ ”
“But are those ice caps?” inquired Thor. “Is this a coherent vision, or a highball?”
“I can do ice caps if I want to,” sniffed the Lord God.
“It’s about a mood,” said the Angel Moroni, supportively.
“Thank you,” said the Lord God.
Day No. 4:
“One word,” said the Lord God. “Landscaping. But I want it to look natural, as if it all somehow just happened.”
“Do rain forests,” suggested a primitive tribal god, who was known only as a clicking noise.
“Rain forests here,” decreed the Lord God. “And deserts there. For a spa feeling.”
“Which is fresh, but let’s give it glow,” said Buddha. “Polished stones and bamboo, with a soothing trickle of something.”
“I know where you’re going,” said the Lord God. “But why am I seeing scented candles and a signature body wash?”
“Shut up,” said Buddha.
“You shut up,” said the Lord God.
“It’s all about the mix,” Allah declared in a calming voice. “Now let’s look at some swatches.”
Day No. 5:
“I’d like to design some creatures of the sea,” the Lord God said. “Sleek but not slick.”
“Yes, yes, and more yes—it’s a total gills moment,” said Apollo. “But what if you added wings?”
“Fussy,” whispered Buddha to Zeus. “Why not epaulets and a sash?”
“Legs,” said Allah. “Now let’s do legs.”
“Are we already doing dining-room tables?” asked the Lord God, confused.
“No, design some creatures with legs,” said Allah. So the Lord God, nodding, designed an ostrich.
“First draft,” everyone agreed, and so the Lord God designed an alligator.
“There’s gonna be a waiting list,” Zeus murmured appreciatively.
“Now do puppies!” pleaded Vishnu. “And kitties!”
“Ooooo!” all the gods cooed. Then, feeling a bit embarrassed, Zeus ventured, “Design something more practical, like a horse or a mule.”
“What about a koala?” asked the Lord God.
“Much better,” Zeus declared, cuddling the furry little animal. “I’m going to call him Buttons.”
Day No. 6:
“Today I’m really going out there,” said the Lord God. “And I know it won’t be popular at first, and you’re all gonna be saying, ‘Earth to Lord God,’ but in a few million years it’s going to be timeless. I’m going to design a man.”
And everyone looked upon the man that the Lord God designed.
“It has your eyes,” Zeus told the Lord God.
“Does it stack?” inquired Allah.
“It has a naïve, folk-artsy, I-made-it-myself vibe,” said Buddha. The Inca sun god, however, only scoffed. “Been there. Evolution,” he said. “It’s called a shaved monkey.”
“I like it,” protested Buddha. “But it can’t work a strapless dress.” Everyone agreed on this point, so the Lord God announced, “Well, what if I give it nice round breasts and lose the penis?”
“Yes,” the gods said immediately.
“Now it’s intelligent,” said Aphrodite.
“But what if I made it blond?” giggled the Lord God.
“And what if I made you a booming offscreen voice in a lot of bad movies?” asked Aphrodite.
Day No. 7:
“You know, I’m really feeling good about this whole intelligent-design deal,” said the Lord God. “But do you think that I could redo it, keeping the quality but making it at a price point we could all live with?”
“I’m not sure,” said Buddha. “You mean, what if you designed a really basic, no-frills planet? Like, do the man and the woman really need all those toes?”
“Hello!” said the Lord God. “Clean lines, no moving parts, functional but fun. Three bright, happy, wash ’n’ go colors.”
“Swedish meets Japanese, with maybe a Platinum Collector’s Edition for the geeks,” Buddha decided.
“Done,” said the Lord God. “Now let’s start thinking about Pluto. What if everything on Pluto was brushed aluminum?”
“You mean, let’s do Neptune again?” said Buddha.
It's a far more likely threat than any posed by "socialism", rogue, but don't expect any support in these quarters.
VERY interesting and informative, rogue. Thanks.
By the way, Oh Worldly Philosophers of the Survery board, greed is the fifth of the seven deadly sins, right between sloth and gluttony.
"Seven Blunders of the World"
1. Wealth without work
2. Pleasure without conscience
3. Knowledge without character
4. Commerce without morality
5. Science without humanity
6. Worship without sacrifice
7. Politics without principle
—Mahatma Gandhi
I just received a 'hot tip' on MRMR from an unlikely source. Anyone know anything? tia
ksuave
I just received a 'hot tip' on MRMR from an unlikely source. Anyone know anything? tia
ksuave
http://www.indwes.edu/tuesday/Crithin.htm
Wanna’ Argue about something?
Go ahead, you pick the subject. I’ll even let you pick either side of the issue. I’ll take the other side. But, should warn you. I’m loaded for bear. You will be engaging a lean mean fighting machine in this battle. I’m mentally riff. Why, I’d reject your ad hominen attacks, expose your begging the question, tear down your straw men, meet your generalizations head on with counter-instances, make fun of your terminological obfuscations and rebuff all your ipsedixitisms. In short, argue with me now and I’ll eat you up and spit you out in little pieces.
You are probably wondering how I became such a well-honed arguing machine. It’s because I finally read a book by Jerry Cederblom and David Paulsen, Critical Reasoning. (Belmont California, Wadsworth/Thomas learning. 2001). Now I’m equipped to win any side of any argument. I can even argue with myself now and always win. I don‘t even need to believe something to win an argument any more, so watch out if you tangle with me!
But just to make this a fair fight I’ll even share my arsenal of definitions I’ve simplified from the book. So to make this more even, here are my simplified definitions of some terms to prepare you for the first round. Learn these well if you want to spar with me!
Critical Thinking Terms
Fallacy of Absent Control
No control study--- “Every time I wash my car, it rains” Is this a controlled study or an observation that it frequently seems to happen just because it usually happens.?
Ad Hominem
Attacking the Person. Pointing out bad associations, personal characteristics, or motives of the opponents.
The impact: “only bad people disagree with me” is often supplemented with an “all good people agree with me.”
Affirming the Antecedent
1) If A, then B.
2) A.
Therefore, B.
For example: If we raise tuition then fewer students will be able to come. We are raising tuition. Therefore fewer students will come here.
Ambiguity
A term has more than one meaning in that context.
Crucial ambiguity
An ambiguity is crucial if, depending on how an ambiguous term is interpreted, in the context of a premise statement, the truth-value of the statement changes between True and False. If we changed this policy we’d get a better student here.
Analogical Reasoning
“X is like X’, and X’ has quality Y (or something like it), so X will (probably) have quality Y too. The big question is whether X is so much like X’ that it’s reasonable to expect their other qualities to be similar too.
Example: IWU is like Taylor University. IWU is has a great spiritual atmosphere. Talyor will have such an atmosphere too.
and / but
Combines a simple statement with a more complex one with the assumption that is the simpler one is true the more complex one will be true too—or false. Simple statement and complex statement (implying both are true even though only the simple one is obviously true.
Antecedent
“Iffy” part of an “if-then” statement.
Appeal to Diffuse Authority
X is true because John F. Kennedy believed it. Or X is true because Mother Teresa believed it. Appeal to famous or non-relevant authority.
Appeal to Force
Truth is a respecter of power. Agree with me or I’ll fire you only makes one believer—the threatened person. Actually firing the person makes lots of other agree with you. People tend to accept statements from powerful people. When someone practices this on you, duck or beat them up.
Appeal to ignorance
Strategy of showing that something must be true because you can’t prove it is false. “There is life on other planets” Can you prove that there isn’t? (same for arguments for God).
Appeal to Pity
Strategy to get a person to accept a proposition because by not accepting it they would harm or hurt another. “Come and be saved tonight or your Grandmother will go to bed crying.” Buy this sweeper form me or my kids will starve.
Argument
One or more statements (premise) are given to defend as true another statement (conclusion).
Argumentum Ad Homily
Explain something with a popular generalization accepted by all. Example: we lost the Basketball game because “You can’t win ‘em all.”
Begging the Question
When the premise is simply a restatement of the conclusion. Example: Reducing taxes gives relief to families therefore we should give relief to families by reducing taxes.
(Principle of) Burden of proof
“Hey you are the one making the statement here—you have got to prove it, I don’t have to disprove it.
Causal Reasoning
Inference that A was the cause for B. “I ate that Big Mac then I threw up” is an example of causal reasoning, but not good causal reasoning.
(Principle of) Charitable Interpretation.
Help the other guys (debaters, salesmen, authors) give you their best shot—reconstruct their arguments in premise-conclusion better even than they have.
(Fallacy of) Composition
The (false) notion that what is true of the parts will be true of the whole. “America’s Olympic basketball team is made up of all-star players, we’ll beat everybody in the world.” Not necessarily true—they all might be great payers, but together as a team they may stink. What is true of all of the parts is not necessarily true of the whole composition.
(Missing) conclusion
An unstated conclusion which the “peddler: hopes you will infer.
Conditional Statement
An if-then statement. The if part is the antecedent, the then part the conclusion.
Conditioning the marketplace:
All the stuff that softens up the marketplace of ideas to accept the proposition. Nice music playing, pretty girls in shorts smiling happily, sponsoring help for the hungry concerts… anything that softens up the folk to receive the proposition.
Confidence strategy :
Proposing the proposition with such confidence that it seems right to the uninitiated. Dressing for success, speaking with clarity and humor, acting certain, saying “well, obviously to any thinking person…” or “as anyone can see…” Making it look true by your bearing and demeanor.
Conjunction
One of many “logical operators” that makes more complex statements out of simpler ones—for example, “and”, “or”, “not”, etc.
Consistent
When it is possible for a series of statements to all be true at the same time.
Consumers of Propositions
In the business of persuasion it is like economics—there are “peddlers” of propositions and “consumers” of propositions. The peddlers “sell” their propositions to the “consumers.”
Controlled experiment
A scientific experiment to discover if A factor causes B result where there is a second group where the A factor is not present—example a the control group placebo.
Counter-instance
Giving an instance showing that a generalization is not universally true. “All white people are hard working. But what about Jake Goofus?” Citing Jake is a counter-instance.
Critical Reasoning
Not merely disagreeing with a proposition, but using a method of understanding and evaluating the proposition.
Deductive Argument
i.e. “valid” argument. An argument stated in a way that if the premise is true the conclusion will also be true.
Denying the Antecedent
An argument based on “Jabberwock” thinking: 1) If A then B. 2) Not A. Therefore, Not B.
Example 1) If John Kennedy was executed by the Cubans he’d be dead. 2) Kennedy was not executed by the Cubans. Therefore John Kennedy is alive. (note: it is called “Jabberwock” in honor the 19th century mathematician and logician Charles Dodgson--AKA Lewis Carroll--author of Alice in Wonderland, and the poem Jabberwocky.)
Denying the Consequent
Defeating an argument by tearing down the consequent argument. Example: 1) If A, then B. 2) Not B. Therefore, Not A. Example: 1) If we raise tuition 2)then we will have fewer students next year therefore we shouldn’t raise tuition. Denying the consequent is simply disproving fewer students will sign up if tuition is reduces. I other words not B, therefore the conclusions are invalid.
(fallacy of) Division
An argument requiring that what applies to the whole will apply to each (or even most) of the parts. “The average number of children per family is 2.2.”
Domino argument
Long chain of cause-and-effect inference. If we allow the government to restrict abortion, they will then restrict family planning, and then they will….”
Fallacy
A pattern of thinking that seems persuasive but shouldn’t be. False.
False dilemma
Or False Dichotomy. A statement that may hide a premise that makes it harder for an idea-consumer to see the premise needs further defense. “Hey that is shrieking, not music” assumes that sounds are either music or not music—which is the hidden premise… but there are other options…maybe it is neither music nor shrieking.
Follows
Saying that C conclusion follows from A arguments. If the argument is valid then C conclusion follows A arguments. If, on the other hand the argument is not valid, then C conclusion does not follow from A argument… this is called a non sequitur (Latin, “It doesn’t follow.”)
General-to-particular Reasoning
Non-deductive reasoning starting with the general (most) and moving to a particular (this). Most men like sports; my husband likes sports.
Hasty Generalization
Accepting a generalization on a sampling that is too small or was selected in some biased way.
Hedgehog strategy
Simply act like the principle of burden of proof is true and thus move squabbles and disputes into more constructive encounters.
Holy cow
A concept regarded automatically as good and thus is immune to criticism. “Democracy is the best form of government.” “We need more women in leadership.” A premise doesn’t need defended if it is proven true, OR if it is accepted as true by all.
Inductive Argument
An argument where the premises do not guarantee the conclusion, but predict a high probability on it.
For example: The vast majority of APS students come from non-Wesleyan homes. Jason is an APS student, therefore Jason is a non-Wesleyan. An inductive argument may be often true… even almost-always true.
Inference indicator
A word or phrase showing the next statement is the inference of an argument: “thus”, “therefore”, “so”, and “consequently.” (“Since,””After all,” and “In view of the fact that” commonly indicate that an upcoming statement is a premise.)
Ipsedixitism :
A statement asserted but not defended. Latin “dixit” (he says) and “ipse” (himself).
Irrational argument :
An argument with one or more premises that do not make its conclusion any more probable.
Logic
The study of the principles of rational inference. That is, what this is.
Negation
Turning a statement into the opposite truth. “The moon is made of Green Cheese.” Negation inserts a “not” -- “The moon is NOT made of Green Cheese.”
Particular-to-General Reasoning
Staring with particulars—samples, evidence from a small group, an individual stuff—and moving to conclusions about a larger population.
Peddler of Propositions:
In the marketplace of ideas those who sell their propositions.
Positive Correlation
The percentage of A’s that are B’s is higher than the percentage of A’s which are not B’s produces a positive correlation. The study showed a positive correlation between campus involvement and later leadership in the community. That is, those with campus involvement who later were involved in the community were more common in the study than those with campus involvement who were not involved in the community.
Process of elimination
Also, “disjunctive syllogism”
1) A or B
not-A
Therefore B.
Either we go to the beach or mountains for vacation. We can not go to the beach. Therefore we shall go to the mountains.
Process of specification:
1) A or B
A
with conclusion not-B.
Either we go to the beach or mountains for vacation. We will go to the beach. Therefore we will not go to the mountains.
Reconstruction
Putting together a structured argument form a collection of sentences issued by the peddler. IN other words, constructing a logical argument form another’s statements in order to examine it logically.
reductio ad absurdum
“Reduce to the Absurd” Showing that an argument is true by showing that its premises are not logically consistent with a rejection (negation) of its conclusion. In other words, if one accepts the premises they can’t reject the conclusion. The way reductio shows this is combining the premises with the negation of the conclusion—presto! You have shown the person that accepts the premise and rejects the conclusion is guilty of self- contradiction.
Rhetorical question.
Using a question to express a statement. “Do you want the government controlling what you do in your Uterus?”
Rhetorical exclamation
Asking a question back in order to answer a question—leaving to the question-asker to figure out what the answer means. Sharon: “Would you like a cold Diet-Coke?” Keith: “Is the Pope Catholic?”
Selection of evidence :
An extra-logical device (lying and evasion and also extra-logical) where a peddler offers only the facts that tend to support the proposition. “Here are 26 reasons why we should move our headquarters from Marion to Indianapolis.”
Self-Contradiction
A logical absurdity --a statement that cannot (logically) be true.
Slippery Slope Argument
The domino theory is a cause-and-effect argument. This is similar but slippery slope purports to have a logical connection more than a cause-effect one. Slippery slope: “I can’t let you turn in that paper late because if I do then every student in the class will then turn in late papers and deadlines will then mean nothing at all.
Sound Argument
A valid (deductive) argument with only true premises.
Straw man
Dismissing a proposition by substituting another in its place (the straw man) then tearing down the straw man substitute and pronouncing the original proposition dead. It is only effective when the straw man looks so much like the original proposition that listeners buy it.
syllogism
An argument composed of three statements in connections. Example: All X are Y, No X are Y, Some X are Y, or Some X are not Y. For example consider “A)students” “as B)leaders” and “C)Wesleyans.” Some A are B, No B are C, and Some A are not C, respectively. “Some students are leaders. No leaders are Wesleyans. Therefore, some students are not Wesleyan.”
Tautology :
Any statement whose truth-value is True regardless of the truth-value any other statements—it is true in all possible situations. For instance, “There are no women presidents of Christian Colleges ,or there is at least one women president of a Christian College.
Terminological obfuscation:
Disguising simple ideas in complicated terminology in order to conceal the true significance (or lack of significance) from the ordinary consumer. Example: this term itself--- why not say confusing things with complicated words… “Terminological obfuscation,” Jeez!
Truth-Value
A statement is either true or false—that is its truth-value.
tu quoque
(“You Too”) A kind of ad hominem argument. Dismuissing the proposition because the person doesn’t “live it” themselves. The truth of a statement is not dependant on the personal life of the person proposing it. Example: mother warning daughter not to smoke when mother smokes.
Validity
An argument is valid (deductive) if and only if there are no possible circumstances under which all the premises would be true, and the conclusion would be false. That is validity means every time and in all circumstances when A and B are true C also follows
Based on the book Crirical Reasoning by Jerry Cederblom and David Paulsen (Belmont California, Wadsworth/Thomas learning. 2001)
Actual statistics:
1. More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users.
2. Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.
3. In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations.
4. More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
5. Bread is made from a substance called "dough." It has been proven that as little as one pound of dough can be used to suffocate a mouse. The average American eats more bread than that in one month!
6. Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low incidence of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, and osteoporosis.
7. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat begged for bread after as little as two days.
8. Bread is often a "gateway" food item, leading the user to "harder" items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter, and even cold cuts.
9. Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey bread-pudding person.
10. Newborn babies can choke on bread.
11. Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 400 degrees Fahrenheit! That kind of heat can kill an adult in less than one minute.
12. Most American bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.
bbotcs: DCTH's drug delivery system gets very good press now and then, and when it does, it spikes mightily, often doubling or more in a day or two. I've personally been in and out -- mostly in -- for the last 3 or 4 years and have cosnistently done well with it, depsite thelong periods of general inactivity in between. It's upward path has been steady in all the time I've known it.
Agree on DCTH, and when they do put out news it spikes hard. 3 year chart:
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=dcth&sid=0&o_symb=dcth&f...
ORFR asking 1.90
someone on another thread is estimating this sale at over 20mil. I just jumped back in this a couple weeks ago, so I am very pleased, but I have a lot of those napping pups as well. One by one, they seem to awaken.
ORFR reports new sales:
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050921/phw033.html?.v=38
EKCS -- racking up more sales with the Air Forces. Very low float, 3.95m.
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050921/215598.html?.v=1
SEHO indeed making a move. Much potential.
Very low float EKCS records 6 mil in sales:
http://biz.yahoo.com/pz/050919/86251.html
SEHO very geared for a run, and it can spike.
API:
$1.2 Million MEDC Grant Awarded to Picometrix, a Subsidiary of Advanced Photonix, Inc.
Friday September 16, 1:24 pm ET
Company to Apply Terahertz Technology to Pharmaceutical Industry
CAMARILLO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 16, 2005--Advanced Photonix, Inc.® (AMEX- API) announced today that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Picometrix, LLC ("Picometrix") has been selected by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation ("MEDC") to receive a $1.2 million 2005 Technology Tri-Corridor Award, to be provided for in the form of a loan to Picometrix pursuant to a loan agreement, dated September 15, 2005, entered into between Picometrix and MEDC. The first disbursement is not subject to satisfaction of any condition other than submission of a request therefor and will be $600,000. The final $600,000 will be distributed to Picometrix, upon Picometrix's request, in 3 equal installments not to exceed $168,000 each and a fourth installment not to exceed $96,000,in each case, upon the achievement of certain milestones.
The loan bears an interest rate of 7.0% per annum and is unsecured. The loan matures 6 years from the date of the promissory note. Picometrix will use the proceeds of the loan to apply its terahertz (T-Ray (TM)) instrumentation technology to developing non-destructive testing (NDT) systems for the pharmaceutical industry.
"Terahertz imaging, which uses the band of radiation between the microwave and infrared portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, can play a significant role in the pharmaceutical industry, given its emphasis on new Process Analytical Technology (PAT)," said Rick Kurtz, Chairman and CEO of Advanced Photonix. "This award helps provide the funding necessary for application specific development and commercialization of our T-Ray 2000(TM) and QA1000(TM) terahertz systems for the pharmaceutical industry."
PAT is a system for designing, analyzing, and controlling manufacturing of drugs and other medical applications through timely measurements of critical quality and performance attributes, and enjoys both industry and FDA support. T-Rays offer a highly accurate, safe and rapid way of conducting material inspection, moisture sensing, spectroscopy and imaging.
"We are pleased to have the support of the MEDC and the state of Michigan in our efforts to develop leading edge technology and to create job opportunities in Michigan," said Rob Risser, CFO of Advanced Photonix and President of Picometrix. "We look forward to working in concert with our sponsors and channel partners to validate and deploy our T-Ray systems for non-destructive testing solutions for the pharmaceutical industry."
The information contained herein includes forward looking statements that are based on assumptions that management believes to be reasonable but are subject to inherent uncertainties and risks including, but not limited to, unforeseen technological obstacles which may prevent or slow the development and/or manufacture of new products; potential problems with the integration of the acquired company and its technology and possible inability to achieve expected synergies; obstacles to successfully combining product offerings and lack of customer acceptance of such offerings; limited (or slower than anticipated) customer acceptance of new products which have been and are being developed by the Company; and a decline in the general demand for optoelectronic products.
Advanced Photonix, Inc.® (ASE: API) is a leading supplier of opto-electronic solutions and Terahertz instrumentation to a global OEM customer base. Products include the patented High speed optical receivers in APD and PIN configurations and silicon Large Area Avalanche Photodiode (LAAPD), PIN photodiode and FILTRODE® detectors. More information on Advanced Photonix can be found at http://www.advancedphotonix.com.
Contact:
Advanced Photonix, Inc.
Richard Kurtz, 805-987-0146
or
Cameron Associates
Richard Moyer, 212-554-5466
The Tinman has the power to delete posts, and he does so in a partisan manner. He deleted a later post, #397 is also missing, and until her reposts it, I will not post here further. With a "conservative" monitoring and censoring it, why would I bother?
Senor Ave
My point, Mr.Bargain, is that the Bush administration is an irresponsible an incompetent steward of the American experience, and the support that has been given to it by misguided conservatives (and "moderates") is proving to be counter-productive to their own interests and goals. Some (such as yourself), however, are so stuck in the divisive conservative-liberal rhetoric that has so deeply harmed this country, that they continue to foolishly -- against their interests -- continue to vehemenently support these crooks. Mount Rushmore indeed. Bush is as likely to end up in a docket in Brussels on trial for war-crimes as he is on Mount Rushmore.
He has disgraced America, a country that only a few short years ago stood as the symbol of freedom, but now is the country that invades other nations to steal their natural resources, tortures its prisoners, denies its own citizens due process, and is ruled by men who golf while its citizens float drowned and bloated in the streets of its cities.
The only good thing that can be said for the Bush administration is that he has likely brought the pseudo-conservative movement to its zenith, and it will be waning from here. Unfortunately, he has done so much harm, we won't recover from the damage he's done in either your or my lifetime. We'll be paying for it the rest of our lives and the rest of our children's lives.
You're not any kind of a conservative, Mr. Bargain; you are an anti-American right wing radical. If you too believe that the government of the United States should be dragged down the hall and drowned in the bathtub, than you are an advocate of activity no less anti-American than anything Osama bin Laden proposes.
Credit (not cash or accountability) is what the Bush administration runs on. If people weren't dying, and our country hadn't been humiliated before the rest of the world, your loyalty to Bush would be humorous, otc. Moral clarity indeed.
Conservative group hits Republicans in Congress, Bush over spending
The American Conservative Union, the nation's oldest and largest conservative grassroots organization, demanded President Bush and the Republican leadership in Congress take action to rein in federal spending Wednesday, questioning how Bush can afford the large sums Congress was doling out in Hurricane Katrina relief efforts while still maintaining federal spending levels, RAW STORY has learned.
"Clearly the terrible tragedy resulting from the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina will require substantial federal resources to be expended, and all Americans support this relief effort," ACU Chairman David Keene said in a release. "But the idea that Congress should spend tens of billions of dollars on this relief effort in the absence of reprioritizing overall federal spending makes absolutely no sense."
Top Republicans will delay votes on making President Bush's tax cuts permanent. The U.S. already bears huge payments to maintain a continuing presence in Iraq and Afghanistan -- more than $1 billion a week. The federal debt has ballooned to over $2 trillion since 2000 and now stands at $7.9 trillion.
"We found that there's plenty of time to do everything that we want to do," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) told reporters Tuesday of his plans to delay tax cuts.
That tax package was to have been debated this month. It will be delayed to make room for Katrina legislation, House and Senate officials told AP.
Meanwhile, a vote to repeal the estate tax has been shelved indefinitely.
The ACU's Keene said conservatives are increasingly "losing faith" in Bush and GOP leaders.
"Because of these massive increases in federal largess, conservatives throughout the United States are increasingly losing faith in the President and the Republican Leadership in Congress to adequately prioritize and rein in overall federal spending," Keene remarked.
"Let us not lose sight of the fact that prior to Hurricane Katrina, federal government spending was already spiraling out of control," Keene added. "Excluding military and homeland security, American taxpayers have witnessed the largest spending increase under any preceding president and Congress since the Great Depression."
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Conservative_group_hits_Republicans_in_Congress_o_0914.html
152 Iraqis freed this morning:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050914/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq;_ylt=AstJbhbv.fUYz2auN33UNKms0NUE;_ylu=X3oDM...
Actually, Yart, the discusion on this board has been focused more on the nature of government, not on the repetition of talking points, nor on saying "nyah, nyah" to each other. Please try to make more substantive posts in the future.
Oh please.
Yes I know that they both stem from the same seed, but I would still choose Kerry over Bush. At least he wouldn't be pandering to the anti-science religious nuts, nor would he be in the drowning-the-government-in-the-bathtub business. If he made only token gestures to certain social responsibilities of governement, at least he'd be making token gestures. He was a horrible candidate, however. We deserved a better alternative to Bush than Kerry, but he was the only one we had, and given the horrible choice again, I'd still vote for Kerry. The Bush administration has been an abomination of arrogance, greed, incompetence and divisniveness. The Bush administration has diminshed the role of America in the world, and we will all suffer for it.
And it would have ben a better world than it is today had Gore won too, regardless who the Repub was. McCain would certainly have ben a better pres than gwb, but Gore could have been an excellent president too. Kerry would have been better than Bush, but not as good as Gore. I personally wouldn't count Gore out as the the Dem candidate in '08. His outspokeness since the '00 fiasco has garnerd him much respect among Democrats.