My friend Mark Pincus makes a very smart and sensible suggestion regarding corporate fraud: If a company has to restate its financial statements, then the executives have to regorge back to the company the profits from any stock sales that that time.

The rule is not dissimilar to the short swing profit rule.

Much better than Sarbanes Oxley in that it punishes the guilty few heavily, rather than all the innocent.

See the write up here:

http://markpincus.blogspot.com/2005/03/will-sec-ever-get-serious-about-making.html

Posted by Guy Spier at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

I have taken this straight from Melanie Phillips diary. It is uncanny how her views conincide with mine - only that she expresses herself a lot better than I do.

Melanie Phillips's Diary: Killing the disabled

She quotes Linda Chavez a hispanic author and policital commentator as follows:

'We have been down this road before when we bought and sold Africans and their progeny as mere "property" and when our courts determined that the unborn are not persons unless their mothers choose to carry them to term. Now we seem on the verge of declaring -- de facto -- that the severely mentally deficient are not persons either. Who will be next -- the gay man suffering from AIDS-related dementia, the Alzheimer's patient who cannot feed herself, the infant with cerebral palsy or spina bifida or hydrocephalus? Will we suddenly find it convenient -- even merciful -- to let such people starve?'

She expands on her thesis in this entry: A new age of barbarism

She ends that article as follows:

Our western culture has thus been utterly brutalised. The bedrock of our civilisation, the absolute respect we afford each other because all human life is equal, has been destroyed. Those who are aghast at this pre-modern brutishness find themselves vilified as obscurantist throwbacks. The judiciary, one of our erstwhile bulwarks against any descent into tyranny, has turned into the enforcer of a post-modern deconstruction of personhood. As psychiatrist William Anderson writes in the Weekly Standard:

'What is to be learned?

1) Hard cases make bad law, but wrong ideas propelled by formidable legal talent may prevail over decency and common sense.

2) The judiciary, at every level, appears to have assumed an arrogant lack of accountability to legislatures and to elementary concepts of right and wrong.

3) Courts that reject laws as unconstitutional if they mandate undesired results are a growing danger to fundamental principles of popular sovereignty and separation of powers.'

All bets are now off. With our common humanity thus now lethally compromised, the way is open for other categories of human life to be progressively declared deficient or undesirable and therefore expendable. We have entered a new age of barbarism.

Posted by Guy Spier at 07:06 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Wow. Even writers from the Guardian are starting to eat humble pie.

Guardian Unlimited Guardian daily comment The war's silver lining

we ought to admit that the dark cloud of the Iraq war may have carried a silver lining. We can still argue that the war was wrong-headed, illegal, deceitful and too costly of human lives - and that its most important gain, the removal of Saddam, could have been achieved by other means. But we should be big enough to concede that it could yet have at least one good outcome. Second, we have to say that the call for freedom throughout the Arab and Muslim world is a sound and just one - even if it is a Bush slogan and arguably code for the installation of malleable regimes. Put starkly, we cannot let ourselves fall into the trap of opposing democracy in the Middle East simply because Bush and Blair are calling for it. Sometimes your enemy's enemy is not your friend.

Posted by Guy Spier at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Buried in this article in the Independent:

Israeli intelligence officers briefed ambassadors of the
EU, the G8, and the UN
Security Council on Friday's Tel Aviv bombing. They read from a
transcript of an intercepted telephone call in which Ramadan Shallah,
Islamic Jihad's Damascus-based leader, ordered a West Bank commander to
go ahead with the bombing. Mark Regev, the foreign ministry spokesman,
said: "In a regime like the Syrian regime, such an order could not come
from Damascus unless the regime was acquiescing or collaborating."

News

And all this from a member of the United Nations Security council. Its a scandal.

Posted by Guy Spier at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Are we celebrating too soo, or are Bush's policies starting to show real vindication on the ground?

Telegraph | Opinion | The Arabs' Berlin Wall has crumbled

Who ever thought that the Middle East could be this exciting, or remarkable.

Posted by Guy Spier at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments ()