To be fair though, there has been an attitude amongst a lot of technical people to "go mercenary". That is, they go work for a company for a year or two then bail out chasing a bigger salary as soon as they feel they can do so. Under those circumstances, why should a company start investing serious money into training up an employee, especially when they'll use that training to go find a new job? Why shouldn't companies try to hire people who they can have working from day one?

I would point out however that the people who make Earth-Observing Satellites are also the very military contractors that you blame for taking money away from these programs. They build the buses, the optics, electronics and launch vehicles that put these satellites into orbit, and these companies are in fact pretty desperately looking for money to keep their currently under-capacity satellite factories busy. The real problem is that the US elected leadership runs on a four year cycle that does not deal well with projects that go beyond a four or even two year cycle. So I wouldn't pin the blame on them for starving this program... unless you believe that the satellite industry is a failed business model.

There were rumors of a possible coup by a faction of PLA officers who allegedly supported Bo Xilai, a former Politburo candidate who was sacked on allegations of corruption and murder. No real evidence, but the central government was already uneasy because such a high profile scandal has introduced significant uncertainty to their succession planning. Therefore, the Chinese government did not appreciate such rumors and speculation spreading like wildfire on the Internet.

It should be noted that the Federal prison system and 11 states already ban this type of search. The SCOTUS decision may allow jurisdictions to do this, but local governments and state legislatures still have the power to ban this practice.

I have to look up the article, but I did read a few analyses on this. They all came to the same conclusion: that the price of a ticket from the 1960s and 1970s is equivalent to about a Business or First class ticket today. We get less service today because people have expressed through their wallets that they would rather pay less for their ticket than have the extra frills.

That being said, some argue that foreign airlines have better service than US domestics. That is true due to two reasons. One, foreign airlines tend to do more international travel which is much more profitable than domestic routes. Two, their labor costs are significantly cheaper.

Just to be objective, but this sort of pandering has gone on throughout the history of the United States and pretty much every other democratic government. In the United States, we've had candidates run commercials that said electing the other guy would make us slaves of the King, slaves of the French, lead chaste white daughters to be violated by scary black people, lead to people beating their waves, lead to our blood poured out upon the soil we farm, lead to nuclear weapons raining down upon our children, and the list goes on and on. Candidates have called each other brutes, hermaphrodites, socialists, communists, fascists, fanatics and heathens. Note that none of these examples even come from the last twenty to thirty years either. Sad part is that this is just a normal part of democracy, and the best we can hope for is that we've sufficiently educated enough of the populace to inoculate them against this sort of rubbish.

The nuclear weapons program is also equally about buying off the Korean Workers' Army. Generals like shiny toys, and few things are shinier for a third world dictatorship than a nuclear weapon.

Doesn't sound all too different from the thousands of interns that work unpaid internships in Washington DC. Instead of working for Foxconn assembling useful products however, they slave away for the US government, think tanks and NGO's making coffee, churning out white papers no one reads and other drudge work with the promise that the networks they build will one day land them a magical job in the political machinery.