The Committee on Armed Services is a committee of the United States Senate empowered with legislative oversight of the nation’s military, including the Department of Defense, military research and development, nuclear energy, benefits for members of the military, the Selective Service System and other matters related to defense policy. The Armed Services Committee was created as a result of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 following U. S. victory in the Second World War. It merged the responsibilities of the Committee on Naval Affairs and the Committee on Military Affairs. Considered one of the most powerful Senate committees, its broad mandate allowed it to report some of the most extensive and revolutionary legislation during the Cold War years, including the National Security Act of 1947; the committee tends to take a more bipartisan approach than other committees, as many of its members served in the military or have major defense interests located in the states they come from.

According to the Standing Rules of the United States Senate, all proposed legislation, petitions and other matters relating to the following subjects are referred to the Armed Services Committee: Aeronautical and space activities pertaining to or associated with the development of weapons systems or military operations. Common defense. Department of Defense, the Department of the Army, the Department of the Navy, the Department of the Air Force, generally. Maintenance and operation of the Panama Canal, including administration and government of the Canal Zone. Military research and development. National security aspects of nuclear energy. Naval petroleum reserves, except those in Alaska. Pay, promotion and other benefits and privileges of members of the Armed Forces, including overseas education of civilian and military dependents. Selective service system. Strategic and critical materials necessary for the common defense. Source: Source: 2010 Congressional Record, Vol. 156, Page S6226 Source: 2011 Congressional Record, Vol. 157, Page S557 Source: 2013 Congressional Record, Vol. 159, Page S296 United States House Committee on Armed Services List of current United States Senate committees Official website Senate Armed Services Committee Report on Torture released November 20, 2008.

Historic archives at Internet Archive: Works by or about Committee on Armed Services at Internet Archive Works by or about Committee on Naval Affairs at Internet Archive Works by or about Committee on Military Affairs at Internet Archive

Ursula Hamenstädt is a German mathematician who works as a professor at the University of Bonn. Her primary research subject is differential geometry. Hamenstädt earned her Ph. D. from the University of Bonn in 1986, under the supervision of Wilhelm Klingenberg. Her dissertation, Zur Theorie der Carnot-Caratheodory Metriken und ihren Anwendungen, concerned the theory of sub-Riemannian manifolds. After completing her doctorate, she became a Miller Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology before returning to Bonn as a faculty member in 1990. Hamenstädt was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010. In 2012 she was elected to the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, in the same year she became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society, she was the Emmy Noether Lecturer of the German Mathematical Society in 2017. Hamenstädt, Ursula. "Geometry of the mapping class groups I: Boundary amenability".

Inventiones Mathematicae. 175: 545–609. ArXiv:math/0510116. Bibcode:2009InMat.175..545H. Doi:10.1007/s00222-008-0158-2. ISSN 0020-9910. Hamenstädt, Ursula. "A new description of the Bowen–Margulis measure". Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems. 9: 455–464. Doi:10.1017/S0143385700005095. ISSN 1469-4417. Hamenstädt, Ursula. "Some regularity theorems for Carnot–Carathéodory metrics". Journal of Differential Geometry. 32: 819–850. Doi:10.4310/jdg/1214445536. ISSN 0022-040X. Home page

Richard Mervyn Hare cited as R. M. Hare, was an English moral philosopher who held the post of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1966 until 1983, he subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida. His meta-ethical theories were influential during the second half of the twentieth century. Hare is best known for his development of prescriptivism as a meta-ethical theory, the analysis of formal features of moral discourse justifying preference utilitarianism; some of Hare's students, such as Brian McGuinness, John Lucas and Bernard Williams, went on to become well-known philosophers. Peter Singer, known for his involvement with the animal liberation movement, has explicitly adopted some elements of Hare's thought, though not his doctrine of universal prescriptivism. Richard Hare was born in Somerset, he attended Rugby School in Warwickshire, followed in 1937 by Balliol College, where he read Greats. Although he was a pacifist, he volunteered for service in the Royal Artillery.

Hare was taken as a prisoner of war by the Japanese from the fall of Singapore in 1942 to the end of the Second World War. Hare's wartime experience had a lasting impact on his philosophical views his view that moral philosophy has an obligation to help people live their lives as moral beings, his earliest work in philosophy, which has never been published, dates from this period, in it, he tried to develop a system that might "serve as a guide to life in the harshest conditions", according to The Independent. He returned to Oxford after the war, in 1947, married Catherine Verney, a marriage that produced a son and three daughters, he was elected fellow and tutor in philosophy at Balliol from 1947 to 1996. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1972 to 1973, he left Oxford in 1983 to become Graduate Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Florida at Gainesville, a post he held until 1994. After suffering a series of strokes, R. M. Hare died in Ewelme, Oxfordshire, on 29 January 2002At his memorial service held at St Mary's Church, Oxford, in May of that year, Peter Singer delivered a lecture on Hare's "Achievements in Moral Philosophy" which concluded by giving three "major, lasting" ones, namely, "restoring reason to moral argument, distinguishing intuitive and critical levels of moral thinking, pioneering the development of... applied ethics".

Hare was influenced by the emotivism of A. J. Ayer and Charles L. Stevenson, the ordinary language philosophy of J. L. Austin, a certain reading of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Immanuel Kant. Hare held that ethical rules should not be based on a principle of utility, though he took into account utilitarian considerations, his hybrid approach to meta-ethics distinguishes him from classical utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham. His book Sorting Out Ethics might be interpreted as saying that Hare is as much a Kantian as he is a utilitarian, but other sources disagree with this assessment. Although Hare used many concepts from Kant the idea of universalisability, he was still a consequentialist, rather than a deontologist, in his normative ethical views. Hare himself addressed the possibility that Kant was a utilitarian like himself, in his "Could Kant Have Been a Utilitarian?" In a series of books The Language of Morals and Reason, Moral Thinking, Hare gave shape to a theory that he called universal prescriptivism.

According to this, moral terms such as'good','ought' and'right' have two logical or semantic properties: universalizability and prescriptivity. By the former, he meant that moral judgments must identify the situation they describe according to a finite set of universal terms, excluding proper names, but not definite descriptions. By the latter, he meant that moral agents must perform those acts they consider themselves to have an obligation to perform whenever they are physically and psychologically able to do so. In other words, he argued that it made no sense for someone to say, sincerely: "I ought to do X", fail to do X; this was identified by Frankena and others as a major flaw in Hare's system, as it appeared to take no account of akrasia, or weakness of the will. Hare argued that the combination of universalizability and prescriptivity leads to a certain form of consequentialism, preference utilitarianism. In brief, this means that we should act in such a way as to maximise the satisfaction of people's preferences.

Hare departs from Kant's view that only the most general maxims of conduct be used, but the consequences ignored, when applying the categorical imperative. To ignore consequences leads to absurdity: for example, that it would be wrong to steal a terrorist's plans to blow up a nuclear facility. All the specific facts of a circumstance must be considered, these include probable consequences, they include the relevant, universal properties of the facts: for example, the psychological states of those involved. While Hare was interested in meta-ethics, he made some important contributions to the fields of political philosophy and applied ethics. Among his essays within these fields those on the wrongness of slavery and the Golden Rule