Slashdot Mirror

Lets be real here....

Netflix is a huge threath to every one elses business model.

- You can watch an entire movie without a single commercial.

- You can practically enjoy every movies in Netflix's inventory for one low monthly price!

- You can watch that movie more than once and you can pick when you watch it at your leasure.

This is forcing the bandwidth providers to a minimal standard of performance for bandwidth, and quality of service delivery, and it's chipping at their monopoly over content delivery since they also own the major Television broadcast services like with Rogers and Bell who are both...

All I can ear here is the local Canadian industry and the leading local bandwidht providers screaming at the top of their lungs at our government via lobbyists and those nasty smelling guys in suits who service the needs of the rich elites they call lawyers...

They are all shouting lets stop Netflix... At all cost!

Our system, is the real problem here. Corporations now have way too much control over policy. The population have no say, no voice, at least not a voice that matters to politicians...

Even when the government appears to be legislating on corporate behaviours they are simply working to ensure the feeding of the largest predators the best scraps of meat...

Noam Chomsky: Can Civilization Survive Capitalism?
http://www.alternet.org/noam-c...

How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful - Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

http://www.alternet.org/story/...

2002. This has been brought up over and over. Apparently it isn't working well enough.

On a recent poll about 1/3 in the USA believe in a young earth (10,000 years or less) and do not believe in natural evolution[1]. About half of the Christian believe that Jesus will come back in the next 40 years[2]. This is pure asinine to any reasonable long term policy and if not tamed could very well doom us all, especially because those believes comes from a first world country, that is military and economically superior. In addition, you have millions of delusional Christians that think WWIII will speed up the second coming of Jesus[3][4].

Moreover, if being religious is deeply ignorant, you should be able to provide strong evidence against the existence of a God. Not just point to a lack of evidence you like, but evidence against it.

First, that proves for me your ignorance of logic. You demand to prove a negative, which is a logical fallacy. Second, absence of evidence is evidence for absence. For example, if I make the claim that I have a cat in my house and you come over and look everywhere for my cat and you don't find anything, that is strong evidence that I lied and that I have no cats. The same is for God or for gods.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article...
[2] http://www.alternet.org/survey...
[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ame...
[4] http://www.washingtonsblog.com...

Governments don't create cable monopolies.

They absolutely do just that when they subsidize the creation of the network infrastructure with our tax dollars, then allow a handful of huge conglomerates to profit off of that forced community investment while gouging the shit out of us and fight back any competition via litigation. Yeah, in the US, not only does the gov't create cable monopolies, it protects them.

Here.

OH! Here's a heap of examples!

Then there's the whole Rush Limbaugh tough on drug abusers except when blowhard radio personalities take so much non-prescribed oxycontin their ears quit working. Why hasn't he had himself locked up? (just Google, there's far too many references to link)

Then there's these.. Here too. Even some (former) Republicans agree.

In a world that seems to be lurching towards greater individual autonomy and personal choice

What utter horseshit:"Individual autonomy and personal choice"?
The food industry has and continues to consolidate, giving food consumers much less actual choice.
Apparently their marketing propaganda has worked...
The "choice" they give us is what they decide.

The fast food industry continues to push the over-eating of meat as "normal" and healthy, which it is not. But it makes them loads of money, which is the driver behind their control of our choice.

Perfect for buying sex toys from Amazon!

As a college educator, I basically agree. But what I can't avoid pointing out that the system is currently set up for exactly the opposite: "open admission" community colleges where everyone with a high school diploma is guaranteed admission, and state financial aid that covers the entire bill (well, allegedly -- most don't complete the program in 2 years, but no one informs them of that until "sunk cost" settles in). See Tennessee moving in that direction this week (link).

The political pressure is to show everyone getting college degrees. The economic incentive on the schools is of course, moire students are more funding. The long-term result seems to be degrading the requirements and expectations (down to the pre-existing depressing high school level). The vast majority of people in community colleges are helpless at 7th-grade algebra (and, I'm pretty sure after graduation).

So it seems like an enormous waste of resources. But I guess the US is so overwhelmingly wealthy we can do this and not really notice. The momentum is certainly driving further in that direction.

Efficiency in private sector is defined to be maximizing the return on investment. Private sector efficiency is NOT delivering goods and services at the least cost to most people. If that is the *only* way to maximize the return on investment, they will do it. It happens on simple products like cereal, bread, milk etc.

It doesn't even work entirely for those. Civic duty used to be an important part of American education. Now we have mega-banks that capture markets and suck the value out of everything they can.

Commodities Speculation: A Cause of Food Crises? A Crime Against Humanity?

How Morgan Stanley Has Raked in Billions by Manipulating the Prices of Everyday Commodities

Sasha Breger: How Commodities Hoarding Distorts Food Prices

There was an article I read with an evocative image of grain rotting in rail cars while crises erupt in the Middle East, but I can't find that article right now.

Obama said that to get people like Eich to vote for him. After he was elected, he rightly threw them under the bus.

If by "throw under the bus" you mean "embrace" by pulling shit like: inviting superhomophobe Rick Warren to the inauguration, kicking a thousand gays out of the military under DADT when he could have issued a stop loss order the moment he was president, asked Congress to stall on repealing DADT, having the anti-discrimination language stripped from the repeal so President Perry will be free to resume discrimination the moment he takes office, comparing homosexual sex to bestiality in court briefs to defend DOMA, refusing to push ENDA and refusing to issue an anti-discriminatory executive order on federal contractors and employees?

Obama either was and is a homophobe or was and is eager to win support from homophobes. Not much a functional difference, just as Reagan might not have personally been a racist but he was sure happy to pander to them and use their language. What moves Obama has taken towards gay rights have been after the public has moved to the gay rights side, and after it became more politically costly for him to continue the discrimination.

Case in point: even a majority of Republican voters favored a repeal of DADT at the same time Obama was busy discharging them from the military.

> But the F35 is more or less combat ready in its basic form

As long as you don't try to land it in cloudy weather.

          http://www.alternet.org/fail-4...

Or on an aircraft carrier:

        http://theaviationist.com/2012...

Or landing on the $1500/each tires twice in a row:

      http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

Oh, and if the landing gear fails and the pilot has to eject, they can't safely eject over water. (See the first article.)

If we needed to build supersonic "launch-only" aircraft, we could have done so _much_ more cheaply.

Revealed: secret plan to push'happy' pills
http://www.theguardian.com/soc...

Big Pharma Could Win International Price Monopoly, Unlimited Profits in 'Free Trade' Deal
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

US patent moves are 'profoundly bad' in leaked TPP treaty
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a proposed free trade agreement under negotiation between Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam. Leaked documents show the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) is pressuring TPP countries to expand pharmaceutical monopoly protections and trade away access to medicines.
http://www.citizen.org/TPPA

The medical industry the third-leading cause of death in the United States; after heart disease and cancer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Big Pharma Shamelessly Shills Dangerous Bone Drugs You Don't Need
http://www.alternet.org/story/...

The H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic: Manipulating the Data to Justify a Worldwide Public Health Emergency
http://www.globalresearch.ca/t...

"Somewhere in Rayong or Chon Buri on the coast of Thailand, a young woman may at this very moment be baring her arm for a shot of an experimental Aids vaccine that many of the leading scientists in the field say categorically has no hope at all of working.

She will be one of 16,000 volunteers recruited for the second large-scale Aids vaccine trial, a $119m exercise many scientists believe is a farce."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/scie...

Fraud has become so endemic in this country that it's woven its way into America’s DNA. 2). Big Pharma Fraud.
http://www.alternet.org/story/...

Drug Makers New Targets for U.S. Fraud Inquiries, Report Says
http://prescriptions.blogs.nyt...

Merck drew up a "hit list" of doctors that needed to be "neutralized" because they criticized the now banned drug Vioxx.
http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Merck invents its own journal to publish bogus research findings to promote it's own products.
http://blog.bioethics.net/2009...

Why Aren't These Fraudulent Papers Retracted?
http://truth-out.org/news/item...

Doubts about Johns Hopkins research have gone unanswered, scientist says
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

A National Survey of Physician–Industry Relationships
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

Revealed: secret plan to push'happy' pills
http://www.theguardian.com/soc...

Big Pharma Could Win International Price Monopoly, Unlimited Profits in 'Free Trade' Deal
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

US patent moves are 'profoundly bad' in leaked TPP treaty
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a proposed free trade agreement under negotiation between Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam. Leaked documents show the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) is pressuring TPP countries to expand pharmaceutical monopoly protections and trade away access to medicines.
http://www.citizen.org/TPPA

The medical industry the third-leading cause of death in the United States; after heart disease and cancer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Big Pharma Shamelessly Shills Dangerous Bone Drugs You Don't Need
http://www.alternet.org/story/...

The H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic: Manipulating the Data to Justify a Worldwide Public Health Emergency
http://www.globalresearch.ca/t...

"Somewhere in Rayong or Chon Buri on the coast of Thailand, a young woman may at this very moment be baring her arm for a shot of an experimental Aids vaccine that many of the leading scientists in the field say categorically has no hope at all of working.

She will be one of 16,000 volunteers recruited for the second large-scale Aids vaccine trial, a $119m exercise many scientists believe is a farce."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/scie...

Fraud has become so endemic in this country that it's woven its way into America’s DNA. 2). Big Pharma Fraud.
http://www.alternet.org/story/...

Drug Makers New Targets for U.S. Fraud Inquiries, Report Says
http://prescriptions.blogs.nyt...

Merck drew up a "hit list" of doctors that needed to be "neutralized" because they criticized the now banned drug Vioxx.
http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Merck invents its own journal to publish bogus research findings to promote it's own products.
http://blog.bioethics.net/2009...

Why Aren't These Fraudulent Papers Retracted?
http://truth-out.org/news/item...

Doubts about Johns Hopkins research have gone unanswered, scientist says
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

A National Survey of Physician–Industry Relationships
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

Most statistics I've seen would argue different. But, I understand why you probably need a boogy man.

Why Elites Want to Mask the Suffering of Poor Whites

Yes because a "We just cured cancer"-discovery isn't going to be profitable AT ALL. Nope. Not at all.

The net profits of the top 11 pharmaceuticals companies was $85B in 2012 - that's net profit, after all expenses are accounted for:

http://www.alternet.org/11-maj...

The profit taking for cancer is large enough that 100 top oncologists wrote a public letter in July of 2013:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ca...

So yeah, it's not going to be *as* profitable for them, unless they can get $12.14 for every man, woman, and child on Earth some other way. Net, after all expenses.

"Dont be naive."

You missed something. There is "plausible deniability". Then there are numerous issues that the president is never told.

The US Has 761 Military Bases throughout the world.

The Worldwide Network of US Military Bases

A really good read... http://www.alternet.org/story/141819/is_the_u.s._on_the_brink_of_fascism

The "Tea Party" has been a corporatist project since 2002.

There is a reason why they were sudden mass media darlings right after the 2008 crash; they have the capital-friendly narrative that corporations want grandfathered into a political 'renewal' should one become necessary. The saddest part is they can't even pay enough people to show up at their low-turnout protests.

Here is an enlightening comparison of fascist history with more recent developments:

The third stage: being there
All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it "fascism" because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations -- passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't act like a married couple.

Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."

This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs.

http://www.alternet.org/politics/141819/is_the_u.s._on_the_brink_of_fascism/?page=entire

A real grassroots movement emerged years later when Occupy Wall St. put a big chink in the corporate narrative armor, and evaporating any semblance of teabagger interpretations to 'inevitability' or even sanity.

It's not an accident that the average Fox News fan is less informed than people that don't watch any news at all, it is on purpose.

According to that linked "study", Fox News viewers are stupid because "91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs" and "72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit" and so forth. Such a high percentage of Fox News viewers believe in these obvious falsehood is a proof that Fox News makes you stupid! or so that article claims.

91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs.
Study: stimulus created 450,000 government sector jobs and destroyed 1,000,000 private sector jobs.

72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit.
GAO report: In rosy scenario, where everything goes perfect, it could decrease deficit by $13.25 trillion!!! or it could increase the deficit by $6.2 trillion.

Apparently not buying into White House's propaganda and disagreeing with liberal's worldview make Fox News viewers stupid. At least they weren't accused of being racist.

It's not revisionist history if there are primary sources and first hand accounts stating the pro-corporate anti-fact checking was the goal of Fox News founder Roger Ailes. It's not an accident that the average Fox News fan is less informed than people that don't watch any news at all, it is on purpose. Fox news may be the worst, but most media outlets have the pro-corporate bias, since that is who owns them and pays the bills.

I dunno about that.
  Even in person, with friends of friends, anyone quoting Rush L. to me immediatly causes me to just disengage. It isn't that I have a vendetta against him, it is that Rush has consistently proven himself to be a mean person, focused only on entertainment and making money over education, thought, or general political discourse. I have never heard an interesting thought come out of his mouth, and most of things he does say are lies and twisted truths to rally his masses into thinking, "ONLY rush understand me, the media doesn't care, but RUSH does"

There are multiple pages-> http://www.alternet.org/20-most-racist-things-rush-limbaugh-has-ever-said
michael J fox http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_fQ3VLSvfI
called Sandra Fluke a slut...

Here is a thorough debunking of why NDE's, while intriguing, are not evidence of anything at all.

This

This

This

This

This

Calling 911 when you life is in danger rarely does any good. Even when it is not screwed up chances of the police showing up in time to stop what you think is about to happen to you are small indeed.

Cops protect cops.

How many cop murders go unsolved? Not many. Why? Because when a cop gets murdered cops think it is important to catch that person. It is not very important to catch your murderer though.

Are you fucking serious? You know Manslaughter only carries a maximum federal sentence of 10 years?

http://www.alternet.org/10-awful-crimes-get-you-less-prison-time-what-aaron-swartz-faced

It's worse that that: http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/16-giant-corporations-have-basically-stopped-paying-taxes GE, Boeing, Verizon, Kraft, Citigroup, Dow Chemical, IBM, Chevron, Fedex, Honeywell (really?), Lockheed Martin, Merck, Apple (as we see), Pfizer, Google, Microsoft. None of the these non-job creators pay shit in taxes.

Yeah, because $6 billion ain't shit. That's what Apple paid in US corporate tax in 2012.

It's worse that that: http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/16-giant-corporations-have-basically-stopped-paying-taxes GE, Boeing, Verizon, Kraft, Citigroup, Dow Chemical, IBM, Chevron, Fedex, Honeywell (really?), Lockheed Martin, Merck, Apple (as we see), Pfizer, Google, Microsoft. None of the these non-job creators pay shit in taxes.

I think it was more of a reference to things like This, this, this, this, and this.

According to the recent human brain study, facts do not matter. So no wonder people still believe in things like Windows (or open-source) safety and security...

This result seems obvious, given the insights into human nature provided by a recent book I just read, called The Social Conquest of Earth by E.O. Wilson. The book maintains that our need to join and protect a tribe or group is a genetic group adaptation. One example he uses is that of religion, where creation myths are believed and taught even when all evidence points to their being false. His claim is that this is an example of multilevel adaptation, where groups who were composed of individuals who 'drank the kool-aid' (my term) were more able to survive than other groups with members who were not so willing to give up personal independence.

So, according to this, republicans are a tribe, democrats are a tribe, mormons are a tribe, etc. Folks in tribes overlook inconsistencies in the core belief set of the tribe simply because pointing them out would make them stand out in the group, possibly leading to expulsion (which would have been fatal for early hominoids). So, the personal stake (adaptation at a personal level) makes them want to stay in the group, and group adaptation makes members of groups who believe the same things more likely to overcome other groups.

What is a little math when you have your survival to consider?

According to the recent human brain study, facts do not matter. So no wonder people still believe in things like Windows (or open-source) safety and security...

Then why are you presenting a fact?

According to the recent human brain study, facts do not matter. So no wonder people still believe in things like Windows (or open-source) safety and security...

Ignoring the misuse of the term 'revenue'...

Your statement flies in the face of reality through reporting like this and this and this. Though it is true that some of the largest companies 'in the US paid anywhere between 25% and 50%' but it was not of revenue, or even profit, but of their expected payment to be allowed to exist in a civil society. There is nothing stopping them from moving to lawless places and doing as they please. If people want civilization, they should pay for it.

They never recovered from bastardry like betraying these dissidents: Shi Tao, Li Zhi, Wang Xiaoning. Who could trust them after that? Yahoo Sells out Chinese Blogger, Yahoo's snitch sends customer to jail for 8-10 years http://www.alternet.org/story/32019/yahoo_sells_out_chinese_blogger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Yahoo!#Outing_of_Chinese_dissidents

Yet another "top 10" list. Can I get a list of the top 10 top 10 lists? Seriously, I'm tired of articles that amount to "someone's list of top 10 X will shock you!"

Ask and you shall receive:
    http://www.alternet.org/story/30157/the_ten_best_top-ten_lists

"The feds didnâ(TM)t just infiltrate and disrupt dissident groups; they made sure the groups knew that they were being infiltrated and disrupted, so activists would suspect one another of being police agents. In effect, COINTELPRO functioned as a conspiracy to defeat subversive conspiracies by convincing the alleged subversives that they were being conspired against."

http://www.alternet.org/books/united-states-paranoia-how-fbi-spied-and-lied-so-conspiracy-theorists-would-sound-crazy?paging=off

I was (as many are apparently) mistaken in the paper industry - marihuana connection. Heard it somewhere, sounded credible enough at the time. Thank you, learned something new today. Though if this article is accurate, the paper connection would have been less ugly...

I guess I might have conflated heroin and morphine, for both being opiates doesn't mean they are classified the same way of course. The latter clearly has medicinal use. Medicinal use of marihuana might, as you suggest, not be entirely understood -- but has been clearly shown to work in many conditions (and often where nothing else does).

- Presenting tariff plans, insurance plans, deals 7 packages, any-kind-of-option in complex and opaque ways that use 'friendly' language, and pics of smiling people — so they can channel you towards whatever 'sounds' like a good deal.
- Changing the way the issue is discussed so the opinions form to 'prefer' what lobbyists favour (creationism, climate change, health-care, the wars, politicians)
- The entire PR and lobbying industry and everything it does.

And thats just the top of my head. — Did you seriously think you invented all the choices you made? You were shown pre-prepared points to discuss, and you just chose one. Not much freedom (or intelligence) in that.
Then they make people who think outside the norm seem like freaks, so you tend to ignore them, rather than discuss them. Try this for size: http://www.alternet.org/print/visions/chomsky-us-poses-number-threats-future-humanity-our-youll-never-hear-about-it-our-free-press

The U.S. government is EXTREMELY CORRUPT. This is no time for joking.

In some ways the U.S. government is the most violent that has ever existed. The U.S. government has invaded more countries than any other country in the history of the world. The U.S. government has more than 760 military bases worldwide. Taxpayers pay, but aren't allowed to know where there money goes.

Read the story about the US government's purchases of over one billion rounds of anti-personnel ammunition. Quote: "The ammunition is to be use domestically, not by the military."

Do you think it won't get worse?

Oh pffsssh. Every decade or so, there's a book from some Christian convert about how secretly the group they were formerly a member of is actually two-faced. "Oh, they seem nice when you get to know them, but *actually* they are practicing hate / debauched sex / devil worship / etc. behind closed doors, which *you* will never be able to see, but you can totally trust *me* because I've been there. And I've usually got some sort of insider connection to make me totally credible."

It's inevitably complete bullshit. (See, e.g., Ergun Caner)

I remember as a kid hearing from the crazier members of my church that ouija boards can contact demons, that people who play D&D are members of satanic cults, that communists teach children not to believe in God by making them pray to God and then the government and giving them a cookie when they do the latter, that the Catholic Church is secretly a Babylonian cult, that modern mainstream Mormons practice blood atonement and have secret assassination squads, etc. etc.

It's amazing what utter nonsense people can be sold on about people different from them. This sort of "they seem nice, but behind closed doors...!" slander is the worst sort of lie, because it's completely unverifiable, and it justifies turning blinders to any signs that the accusation isn't right.

"WTF are they collecting this data for?"

To identify conservatives for "random" IRS audits.

...and non-conservatives as well.

Not that this ever happened under other Presidencies.

Lets see how misguided you were by the news. The woman in question: - was previously arrested for domestic violence and no complaint was ever registered against her husband. - went out of the room and into the garage to get a gun and got back to fire. She didn't run, she didn't lock herself in a room and called the police. And her husband stayed at the room and didn't follow her. She fired several shots at arbitrary directions that could not only have hurt her family as could have hurt or killed innocent people in the neighborhood. No, it wasn't about race or gender, it was just a crazy, violent and irresponsible woman playing the domestic violence card to falsely accuse her husband in the hope of getting a free out-of-jail card. An attempt that fortunately failed.

Even her husband, the 'target' disputes your version of events. In case you have trouble following the link:

On Aug. 1, 2010, Marissa Alexander, a 31-year-old mother of three, with a Master’s degree and no criminal record, was working for a payroll software company in Jacksonville. She was estranged from her abusive husband, Rico Gray, and had a restraining order against him. Thinking he was not at home, she went to their former house to get some belongings. The two got into an argument. Alexander says that Gray threatened her and she feared for her life. Gray corroborates Alexander’s story: “I was in a rage. I called her a whore and bitch and ... I told her if I can’t have you, nobody going to have you,” he said, in a deposition. When Alexander retreated into the bathroom, Gray tried to break the door. She ran into the garage, but couldn’t leave because it was locked. She came back, he said, with a registered gun, which she legally owned, and yelled at him to leave. Gray recalls, “I told her I ain’t going nowhere, and so I started walking toward herI was cursing and all that and she shot in the air.” Even Gray understands why Alexander fired the warning shot: “If my kids wouldn’t have been there, I probably would have put my hand on her. Probably hit her. I got five baby mommas and I put my hands on every last one of them, except for one . I honestly think she just didn’t want me to put my hands on her anymore so she did what she feel like she have to do to make sure she wouldn’t get hurt, you know. You know, she did what she had to do.” And Gray admits Alexander was acting in self-defense, intending to scare and stop but not harm him: “The gun was never actually pointed at me The fact is, you know ... she never been violent toward me. I was always the one starting it.” Ultimately nobody was hurt. Nobody died. On May 12, 2012, it took a jury 12 minutes to find Alexander guilty of aggravated assault. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The irony here is that the judge would not let her use the "Stand your Ground" law in her defense.

The difference is that if Zimmerman was black, he would have been arrested on the spot and he would already be serving his life sentence.

You are right

People living paycheck-to-paycheck sorta by definition don't have $50-$100 to leave in a bank account to satisfy the minimum deposit requirements. Predatory practices like those being discussed in the article are part of the reason why it's so hard to save money when poor: being poor is expensive .

Why pay through the nose, both in terms of dollars and in terms of horrendous lead times, for space-qualified parts when commercial, industrial, and automotive parts work just fine?

Heh.. Proof right there that you're not affiliated with a US government agency. And, to answer your question, the reason is to keep the tax dollars funneling into the privatized black-holes* It's rampant.
[*]
http://rt.com/usa/blackwater-security-iri-report-300/

http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Corporate-Greed/ALEC-s-Funnel-Turns-Public-Dollars-to-Corporate-Profits

http://www.alternet.org/one-states-poor-excuse-funneling-taxpayer-cash-private-schools

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/03/01/1181678/-Walker-s-Plan-for-Wisconsin-Public-Schools-Make-Them-Private

While the influence of video games on gun violence is unproven, casting the problem as a mental health issue fails to fully account for the gender gap.

http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/rhrealitycheck/elephant-room-why-gunman-always-male

Proves that for the weapons fetishists

This is the most contrived attempt I've ever seen to artificially try work an off-topic ad hominem attack on gun owners into an unrelated discussion.

Incidentally, it is the same administration (the one you support) using drones like this to murder children overseas, that are pushing for gun control.

The Black Panthers party even encourage Black Youth to commit crimes and commit crimes against Whites. They were disbanded at one point in time because one of their main leaders raped and killed white women claiming it was payback for the masters doing it to the slaves.

Citation needed.

Criminal enterprises notoriously buck the white system...

The most deadly and most profitable criminal enterprises are run by white guys in suits.

I just read an article about a young woman whose only crime was that she gave her boy-friend's Mother a ride to a house. The older woman went in unbeknownst to the girl for crack cocaine and was busted inside the house by an undercover officer. The girl received a mandatory 12 year prison sentence without the possibility of parole. She had no criminal record, was in the top 2% of her High School Class, volunteered public service regularly and had multiple scholarships for college. Even the Judge who presided over the case called it a grotesque miscarriage of justice and that these "hard on crime laws" with mandatory sentences that don't provide judicial discretion are stuffing the prisons with innocent people.

There are still people in Texas doing a life sentence for a gram of hash. Read this article to find out about some of the most ludicrous prosecutions that portray a gross disregard for people that has become commonplace in certain regions of the United States. There are many people in prison whose only crime is possession. The prosecution of poorer Americans (which means disproportionately people of color), has become a conveyor belt that is prison bound. The war on crime has created a legal assembly line with millions now serve (3 in 4 people in prison today are there as a result of the war on crime.) The police sandbag those they arrest to assure a prison sentence. Heaping felonies on a defendant, the defendant is then forced to choose a plea bargain for 10 years while facing 110 years worth of charges. Public defense is barely better than no defense at all. So innocent and guilty alike are shoveled into prison like human refuse. The war on drug has imploded the criminal justice system, and turned it into a revolving door that feeds people indiscriminately in, and to abate prison overcrowding lets others out, then again you have those states that have now turned their privatized prisons into labor camps, and the vary companies that provide prisons have lobbied for longer and harsher sentences because its good for their bottom line.

There is abundant information talking about the disproportionate prosecution of people of color for drug related crimes. You could read this article or this scholarly article. Before you comment on this, please bother to get at least basically informed on the subject. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark... er America.

Finally, the fact that you don't know about the corporate connections to Marijuana becoming illegal in the first place and remaining so currently just emphasizes that you haven't done your homework. You can go here to read this article to find out how an over ambitious Federal Agent and William Randolph Hearst worked together to demonize hemp in the first place. Today Big Pharma spends millions to keep Pot illegal because they don't want competition for their prescription analgesics, synthetic opiates, anti-nauseals, appetite enhancers, mood elevators and anti-carcinogenic drugs, and there's no money on a natural substance you can't patent. If it sucks today and involves more than 3 people, I can follow the money back to a lawyer, a politician and a corporation or a religious fanatic. That is the sad state of American in the twenty first century. Wake Up

The rash of these events this year is frightening, but before this year it was as rare as Norway.

Wrong.

You know I see this term bandied about, "post scarcity society" and I have to laugh.
Really? Post scarcity?

Please read up on our prospects for clean drinking water(one among many of coming scarcities.)

Wrong. See this article quoting Victor Cha, GW Bush's top advisor on North Korea:

"All these bags go into the country with the American flag on it and in Korean it says, 'Gift from the American people.' So that is not a bad thing for us in North Korea," he told the hearing.

http://www.alternet.org/rss/breaking_news/515569/us_lawmakers_oppose_n.korea_food_aid

That is just one article. I original article I read where it was reported that the US flags were everywhere was in Time or Newsweek or one of those. I'll dig it out if you require further proof. I sure the North Koreans try to get the food unlabelled (and may have succeeded now) but that is not what has happened in the past. They really are fuckers.