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It was not "proven false". The guy did some preliminary studies of it and concluded it was different. Those who had originally contacted him did not choose to pursue the matter for the type of study that would be needed to prove things conclusively.

Because they knew it would be proven false.

I do not know that Ayers wrote "Dreams From My Father", what I do know is that Obama did not.

And how do you know this?

As to launching his political career at the Ayers' home, you are saying that he launched it somewhere else. OK, where? Where did Obama first anounce that he was going to run for the State Senate of Illinois? According to everything I have seen, it was at the Ayers' home. You are claiming that it was somewhere else. Where was that?

Everything you've seen has been sold to you by the nutjob right. Ayers himself notes that his house was only one of probably about 20 that Obama visited that night. Other sources corroborate that. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95442902

If you want to explain the software patent issue to someone else here is a good story on em. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/08/02/138934689/the-tuesday-podcast-the-patent-war

"People can't multitask very well, and when people say they can, they're deluding themselves," said neuroscientist Earl Miller. And, he said, "The brain is very good at deluding itself."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95256794

spare me... Its like saying "people can't run very well" or "people aren't very tall". There's a nice bell curve and both jobs and personal satisfaction naturally select following the Peter Principle. The village idiot maxes out his Peter Principle at doing about one thing at a time. The short order cook from the article apparently maxes out around two dozen or whatever. Everyone else bell curves in the middle.

"People can't multitask very well, and when people say they can, they're deluding themselves," said neuroscientist Earl Miller. And, he said, "The brain is very good at deluding itself."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95256794

"If you think high taxes on the Rich is apart of the solution, take a look at NY State, they did this and the rich have either left or are in the process of leaving and lowering NY's revenue generation." is factually incorrect.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/29/135813061/studies-rich-dont-flee-high-tax-states

Ethics @ Google?

Yes

They are one of the biggest UK/EU tax dodgers. They don't give back to society. Ever hear about the Double Dutch Sandwich?

You mean unlike other ethical companies like Microsoft?

I am an employee for one of the biggest American ex-HF/Bank in London, but from a moral perspective I feel Google is as transparent as the banks.

Then clearly you have never worked @ Google.

Use your head.

Google are common thieves and are like all the fat cats we love to hate, but really if we look inside things we all know how they can afford to give you free swimming pool or pay you 500K USD per year...

I dunno, maybe because we put out high quality products that people actually like using?

Just don't go around like a peacock as the typical American who likes to show his salary, thinking you really are paid with don't be evil money.

Of course, the reason I posted anonymously is because I want to show off my salary. BTW, I am NOT American.

When you know the true reality about all this huge Ponzi scheme which is the global economy, and know Google is part of it, then probably I guess you'd feel a bit ashamed.

This is rich coming from a guy who admits he works for an American financial institution. Clearly, as everyone knows, Google is responsible for the state of the global (and US) economy, and not the American financial institutions .

What a sad sad world we live in.

I agree, which is precisely why I am thankful that I can work for a company like Google. Maybe you should consider not working for an American bank in London?

Ethics @ Google?
They are one of the biggest UK/EU tax dodgers. They don't give back to society. Ever hear about the Double Dutch Sandwich?
I am an employee for one of the biggest American ex-HF/Bank in London, but from a moral perspective I feel Google is as transparent as the banks.
Use your head.
Google are common thieves and are like all the fat cats we love to hate, but really if we look inside things we all know how they can afford to give you free swimming pool or pay you 500K USD per year...
Just don't go around like a peacock as the typical American who likes to show his salary, thinking you really are paid with don't be evil money.
When you know the true reality about all this huge Ponzi scheme which is the global economy, and know Google is part of it, then probably I guess you'd feel a bit ashamed.
What a sad sad world we live in.

I use Google Reader to gather data from any rss feed of interest and also download weekly about 60 podcasts from various sources each week using the Feedreader aggregator. I have to plug, in particular, podcasts (or videocasts) from This Week in Virology, This Week in Parasitism, and This Week in Microbiology, all available via a starting point of www.twiv.tv . (If you think Parasitism is not interesting, listen to TWIP 22.) The Naked Scientist based in Britain offers a nice weekly collection of news gathered from that area. The Australian Broadcasting Network at www.abc.net.au/radio/ offers podcasts about technology oriented towards that part of the world. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp and the BBC also offer podcasts which include new developments in all areas, but don't allow you to specialize in one area, such as medicine or computers. Futures in Biotech ( http://twit.tv/FIB ) has produced some terrific interviews in that area and Leo Laporte and his This Week in Technology does a few podcasts that offer more than his usual troubleshooting genre. http://www.podnutz.com/ is strictly computers, but three podcasts in particular are of interest as trendsetting. They are 274, 302 and 316. They deal with the development and growth of Lisa Hendrickson's career. She's a female computer troubleshooter who is rapidly building a large business that repairs computers remotely and worth watching and learning from as an example of how to grow a new business in the US. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute produces podcasts and videocasts about advancing technology Do a search for NIH Videocasts for presentations by this organization. Econtalk may not be strictly technical, but has outstanding interviews about developments and history that disproves that idea that economics are dry and boring. I've been saving a list of Best Podcasts for over a year and they number now about 90, but amount to over 2GB, so are not readily posted. I also have the addresses of podcasts that are plugged into the Feedreader aggregator that I'll try to add here in case that's of interest if the moderator agrees to include them. Several of these were worth noting, too, like NY Times Tech Talk and RadioLab: http://rss.conversationsnetwork.org/ppq/56641.xml http://podcast.seti.org/index.xml http://www.rtve.es/podcast/radio-5/asunto-del-dia-en-r5/SASUNTO.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/booksandideaspodcast http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/clickon/rss.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/Cyberspeak http://feeds.feedburner.com/diffusionradio http://www.econlib.org/library/EconTalk.xml http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510030 http://feeds.feedburner.com/GlobalChallenges http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/healthc/rss.xml http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/HHMI_Lectures.xml http://podcast.thelancet.com/laneur.xml http://www.materialstoday.com/rss/podcasts/ http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/podcasts/techtalk.xml http://dow

Don't let reality form yours:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129926390

The people who attend the rallies are being spoon-fed dogma to guide their votes, while the candidates they elect have an agenda set by the $$'s.

It's a McParty, and it's willing to destroy the country and sell off the pieces.

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

Glenn Beck hangs out with these types of fucking lunatics.

More info here.

Same thing for that blowhard drug-addict Rush Limbaugh.

The type of retarded, inbred moron who frequents "Tea Party" rallies generally gets their "information" from Beck and Rush. Or they are devotees of insane scumbags like Ron Paul.

Either way, they are dangerous. And more dangerous is the group of people like the Koch Brothers and the other puppetmasters behind the scenes who bankroll their noise machine and buy up corrupt ass-tard politicians like Newt Gingrich and Scott Walker.

Interesting, but what what about when two different groups make up 10% each in an unshakeable belief?

It does remind me of a story I heard on NPR once called Nature's Secret: Why Honey Bees Are Better Politicians Than Humans, which was discussing information from the book Honeybee Democracy .

I assume he's referring to this

In 1979, during a similar dick-waving exercise as today, the US didn't pay some (tiny fraction of) T-bills in a timely manner, technically defaulting on them. The result was that the US had to pay a higher interest rate on all its debt for many years afterwards. Quickest link I could find, plenty more out there.

Well, get YOUR facts checked, yes the DOD terminated the engine, but Boehner has been trying his damnest to restore funding
http://www.npr.org/2011/02/18/133875475/Funding-Fight-Puts-Boehner-In-Tough-Spot

And I don't buy this "sigh, those politicians are all the same" line of defeatist bullshit.
Yes, the Democrats have disappointed me in MANY cases, but there is a clear difference, in my book, in the parties when it comes to who is willing to govern with a sense of rationality, and in a manner that supports the interest of the American people.

We need, a comprehensive national health insurance plan, and we need it yesterday. We spend almost twice as much, don't cover everyone, and have health outcomes that are largely no better.
If you want to support small business and entrepreneurship, support national health care. That way somebody starting/running a business can concentrate on the buisness, and not what happens if his kids need to go to the doctor.

This American Life is distributed by PRI. Yes it plays mostly on NPR affiliates, but NPR has nothing to do with making it.

Note, however that this week's episode was a co-production if This American Life and NPR's Planet Money.

Normally, this statement would be correct, but not always.

They also said that the one case Intellectual Ventures gives as their "poster child" of an "inventor whose idea was being used illegally until IV came along" actually had over 5500 duplicates granted in the same time frame (nevermind all the prior art that existed).

Not quite... Actually, it's pretty clear that the journalists have no idea what they're talking about - they note three patents that [OMG] have the same title... while failing to note that two of them are continuations of the first one, and that they have very different claims. Their evidence for all of those duplicates, again, are the titles. Any patent practitioner, including myself, will tell you that titles have no legal weight, and the fact that two patents have identical or similar titles says absolutely nothing about whether they're duplicates or not... but apparently, This American Life failed to ask anyone about that.

Frankly, the transcript shows the lack of investigation that you can expect from NPR and PRI's fluff shows. Some producer did a few minutes of research on Wiki, made a couple phone calls and recorded some soundbites, and then threw it together into a story without checking any of the conclusions from those soundbites. This isn't journalism... this is "he says X. She says Y. The end."

Full disclosure: I am a US patent agent, and formerly worked for a major NPR affiliate station group. Some of the shows do great work. Others, not so much.

Well, I finally found something resembling TFA

These x-ray scanners give you a much smaller ionizing radiation dose than you'll get from the flight itself.

This is true. However, the harder radiation you get from high-altitude travel is full-body radiation -- it passes through your entire body. The radiation from the TSA scanners are concentrated on the skin. This negates any chance of deep tissue cancers, but raises the chance of skin cancer.

Personally, I won't get in one of those machines. I like a good pat-down or two on my vacations, anyway.

Don't make a straw man argument about infrastructure. I'm talking about the billions of dollars in useless federal and state regulation, taxes that are taxes upon taxes. The ponzi scheme that is social security, which just came under threat from the Obama administration of having its funds cut off even though only $.25 on the dollar go to pay current benefit recipients, meanwhile the federal government has been borrowing $.75 of every dollar paid into social security. And they have the audacity to tell us, sorry now we're going to borrow $1.00 of every dollar paid into the already empty fund! You can keep payin' us but we're going to be paying our federal workers and entitlement programs with that money. And what's Obama's solution to the problem? Raise taxes by 1 trillion!

"The feds" don't print money, "the fed" (federal reserve bank) prints money which in turn is borrowed by "the feds" (federal government). The federal reserve bank is no more the federal government than federal express. They are two different entities, one of which ("the fed") was quite unconstitutional. They borrow money from foreign governments and others in the form of t-bills that must be paid back with interest. That goes to 1. devalue the currency because more is in circulation and 2. borrowing on behalf of the public makes the public liable to pay back such funds, and was the unconstitutional bit, along with having a currency that is not backed by gold as it was intended by the framers. How now it is constutional when then is wasn't? The Living Constitution. Duh!

"General welfare" is perverted in numerous ways thanks to the liberal doctrine of the Living Constitution. Now that the flood gates are opened to the free interpretation of the meaning of the words in the constitution welfare can mean just about anything. As James Madison said: " What a metamorphosis would be produced in the code of law if all its ancient phraseology were to be taken in its modern sense." Indeed, that is the key reason why the government today is so alien to the principals of founders. If you can take "the right to bear arms shall not be infringed" to mean " we shall infringe upon the right to bear arms any time we damn well please." what can't you do?

This is where the true issue is. Also for those of you who really like a good conspiracy the whistle blower was found dead and police ruled that it wasn't suspicious.

You aren't entirely correct there. The fact that you pay for goods and services with money is what gives it value. You got that part right.

But currency is not linked to 'sum of goods and services'. If it was linked, then money could be printed and the amount of goods/services available would increase. Sadly this is not the case, as post WWI Germany found. Money only has value because we think it has value. Furthermore the value a dollar has is equal to what we collectively think it is worth. This is as true for government issued currency as it is for bitcoins.

Take a look at either of these articles if you are still clinging to the notion that your money has real value
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-fake-money-saved-brazil
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/423/the-invention-of-money

Again the be all, end all of all this searching, will be terrorists with bombs either in their rectum, or surgically implanted.

This has already been done SUCCESSFULLY in Saudi Arabia in 2009 ., and they used a cell phone trigger. Suicide bomber died, but didn't kill the Saudi Prince. There happened to be audio going, and it catches the cell phone going off inside!! the bombers abdomen - wow....
NPR link
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113509667

CFLs are also toxic: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7431198

Furthermore, when the ban was enacted, in order to produce CFLs at a price people wanted them at, light bulb companies simply moved their factories to China.

Thank God we have the government telling us what to do!

Yay for consistency in the media. NPR reports

Ah, NPR, the intellectual arm of American media that reports such gems as

to hold the banner out straight on the gravity-free moon.

"It was put in the trash can and I just took it out and said, `I'm going to keep that,'" he said.

Moser said he had Neil Armstrong sign a photo of the flag planted on the moon when the astronaut returned to Earth and he kept the picture and his rescued scrap of flag together in his NASA office until he retired in 1990.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/05/137530847/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-hit-song?sc=emaf

When I read this it made me very happy to live in Texas, the TSA's power has been greatly decreased here and this is why http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/06/28/137474796/texas-legislature-approves-anti-pat-down-bill

...called 'hot coffee'...

It was on HBO and about not just legal tactics, but the overarching tort law & exploring the desire for 'tort reform' and the mandatory arbitration clauses that exist in most any contract (including EULAs - not that I believe them to be contracts in the legal sense) these days.

NPR did an interview with the filmmaker a few days ago - one of the related stories is here

I am not seeing where NPR posted the breakdown of this cost. The only explanation was General Anderson's statement of including "escorting, command and control, medevac support".

In fact, if you read the transcript of the interview the article is based on, General Anderson does not say if the $20 billion figure is per year, or over the whole ten years we have been at war.

Finally, just because General Anderson is an expert and "knows what he's talking about", does not mean he is being honest. Argument from authority and all that.

This is the major reason why the military has been investing heavily in green tech. A gallon of diesel fuel at the front lines in Afghanistan costs the military something like $400 because it first needs to be shipped in-country, then trucked through hostile territory on roads, and sometimes lashed to a mule and packed in. Plus, supply convoys are ripe targets - casualties due to roadside bombs these days are comparable, if not higher, than actual combat. The military realized this a couple of years ago, looking at the single-walled canvas tents they are cooling with A/C run from diesel generators in a 110 F desert. Being one of the biggest users of, well, everything in this world, their economies of scale and opportunities for savings at home and in theater are huge. They have been working on it, but it's a huge infrastructure and logistical change to undertake. If anything, it should give us all pause to realize how big a job the rest of the world will have to change our own infrastructure and habits to become more efficient.

Well, I do honestly agree with the letter that was published sent to Holdren last year by four scientists at UCSF regarding these devices and I believe until all their concerns are addressed that the technology is not safe. I haven't seen a public reply to this letter by the US Government.

http://www.npr.org/assets/news/2010/05/17/concern.pdf

I read the American Thinker article and found it interesting compared to a previous article I had read .

To summarize it: The Corp is required by law to follow the MWCM (Master Water Control Manual), which is controlled by congress and includes both commercial and environmental interests among others ("...navigation and flood control, this list of priorities includes irrigation, water supply, hydropower, fish and wildlife, recreation and water quality.") These priorities conflict with pure flood control.

Given that I found it curious that the American thinker article targeted the Corp for following the law and environmental interests (fish and wildlife, I guess) for input. Considering the omissions I've trash-canned the American Thinker article, and the site.

Care to revise that Paul Revere statement?

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/06/137011636/how-accurate-were-palins-comments-on-paul-revere

^ that's not exactly a "right-wing" organization defending her, BTW.

Care to revise that bus tour statement?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/23/us-usa-palin-idUSTRE75M0N720110623

Care to acknowledge that maybe regurgitating the pre-chewed media talking points may not be the best way to win an argument?

Gee, lookitthat, 10 seconds' worth of Googling, and 90% of your bullshit is out the window. Your move.

To further illustrate your point about the current disconnect with actual costs, check out this piece from NPR about how drug companies game the copay system to sell massively over-priced drugs which in turn causes large increases in health insurance premiums.

I think "non-profit" is supposed to mean any organization whose stated goal is something other than making as much money as possible, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. Yes, people who work in non-profits can sometimes make good money, and have an incentive to do well so they can earn more money, and sometimes corrupt the organization to enrich themselves, but by and large they still have to deliver on the purpose of the organization itself or get ousted.

In a for-profit media company, the consumers of the media are the product they sell to advertisers. Each listener/reader/viewer has a certain value in the eyes of the advertiser (how much they are likely to profit from them seeing the ad) that drives how much they pay for advertisement. The interesting thing is that in a non-profit, the value of each listener (for example) in the eyes of the station is how much that consumer is willing to contribute toward the content, a figure completely unrelated to what the advertisers would pay for that same listener. Commercial radio stations typically have large but apathetic audiences, so they have to drive up audience numbers to get any advertising revenue at all. Public radio stations, on the other hand, have smaller but much more interested (including many intellectual and wealthy) audiences and so can raise money more easily. As a result, it is those engaged listeners who control the content, not the advertisers, and the quality of the content goes up. (source)

You raise an interesting question about the opposite extreme: I don't know if rewarding individual pieces is a good idea. It could drive a different sort of dynamic--would you contribute as much to a good investigative piece if it contradicted your beliefs even though it was true? Would reporters shy away from important but risky stories if there was more money to be made on other topics? A large organization can absorb the risk involved in writing controversial stories for the public good in a way that an independent reporter might not be willing or able to do.

In a Planet Money piece on the market for stolen credit cards last week, they mentioned in passing that Bitcoin is already being used to purchase stolen credit card numbers. If that doesn't attract your government's attention, nothing will.

They also said that they're preparing a story on Bitcoin itself. If Bitcoin survives till the story comes out, that will surely be the kiss of death, in my opinion ...

Never trust the government. Especially old data from them: http://moneywatch.bnet.com/economic-news/blog/macro-view/manufacturing-surprise-the-us-still-leads-in-making-things/2134/ http://beta2.tbo.com/news/nation-world/2011/jan/31/T2NEWSO1-us-still-leads-world-in-manufacturing-pro-ar-11399/ http://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/dnllist.asp http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102761476 http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/120660/20110309/usa-still-leads-manufacturing.htm http://www.mepol.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=214:made-in-america-still-on-top-of-the-manufacturing-game&catid=1:news&Itemid=187 *

I listened to this broadcast as well, and he didn't mean just farm equipment. It was "Tools" in general.

It was an interesting piece, check it out: Tools Never Die. Waddaya Mean, Never?

This is somewhat akin to the argument made a while back on an NPR show by Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired Magazine: that tools never die. No matter what tool you can think of, it is still in active use somewhere on Earth by someone: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/02/04/133188723/tools-never-die-waddaya-mean-never

>irrational

Speak for yourself.

As someone living up here in the Northeast, when you come up here to lecture us about history (there are 391 years of it here), you'd better know your shit.

But no, she came up here, didn't know, tried to make some sort of point that I'm still trying to figure out, and is arrogant about it. And that's just recent history. Just trying to parse her word salad on a day to day basis must make any political aide or reporter go insane.

Yet she has aspirations to be President some day.

Stupid isn't bad, if you're not bull-headed. Arrogant isn't bad if you know your stuff. Stupid *and* arrogant? You really want that?

The hatred is not irrational.

--
BMO

Not irrational? Hmmm... I suppose we have different definitions about that. However, that being said I have to ask if you merely accepted the story that Palin was an idiot on those comments or did you bother to look around and do some reading? At least NPR did do some asking around and such.

Maybe your idea of history is based on a poem, not real history.

Analysis of emails showed she is a "solid communicator." Reading though the emails showed her as someone who, shockingly to you, was focused on doing her job well.

"Stupid *and* arrogant" would describe your president better than Palin. This week he was blaming ATMs and tech innovations for joblessness. I guess free ATMs refill, maintain and update themselves. Maybe he'd prefer we were all toiling in fields like serfs.

War Powers violation on Libya? Arrogance. Mocking tone in all his speeches? Arrogance. Flubbing a bog standard toast of the Queen? Arrogance and stupidity. Pushing Israel to negotiate on indefensible '67 borders? Arrogance and stupidity. Asked about high gas prices, he said buy a new car. Stupidity. Attacking "millionaires and billionaires" for not paying their fair share while avoiding taxes on his own millions so much he pays at 13% below his bracket's rate? Arrogance.

A sitting president is virtually all powerful and he is not get near the scrutiny as a woman holding no political office. What the hell!

I don't even like her or her fanatics but I recently noticed that deranged drumbeat against her, even in private life and it has made me realize she may not be all that bad! Where's the anal probe for failed, out of touch, White House leadership or the Congress which hasn't passed an actual budget in years?

Planet Money just did an episode on this ( http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/06/16/137181702/the-tuesday-podcast-inside-the-credit-card-black-market ) and, yes, some of them do accept BitCoin (as well as other nontraditional currencies).

democratic

Oh, they will, as soon as they get rid of all obstacles to that noble goal, such as "niggers" and other Qaddafi sympathizers.

secular

Eh, didn't you just say you wanted it to be "democratic"? That means like Afghanistan under NATO - people do vote, and they vote to make Sharia their constitution.

but they can't find the U.S. $ 6.6 billion" "missing" in Iraq.

Dear F.B.I. : For some prime suspects, try the Washington, D. C. area.

Yours In Minsk,
K. Trout

a citizen journalist is going to be less careful about sources and fact checking

Often stated, rarely proven.

Here's a recent story that might support your view, where the international got all excited over dozens of bodies supposedly discovered in a house in Texas, even though the only evidence was a psychic who called in a police tip.

On the other hand, from what I've read in the aftermath of this story, what caused this story to spread initially was lax standards about who could post to a Twitter feed at a local news organization; Reuters read the Twitter feed, and the rest is history. By the time the local news station had checked its sources and decided not to run with the story on the air, the story was everywhere.

If relying on a Twitter feed that didn't go through official approval channels at a local news station could cause this much crap, do we really think that relying on random Twitter and blog posts by a group of unvetted people many times as large will result in greater accuracy?

American government have no problem stomping on rights of citizens because of the "war on terror" (read: against us, Muslims), surely, they would have no problem restricting them in order to suppress the culture of drugs in US.

You must not have been paying attention: our rights have already been stomped on by the war on drugs, right from the very beginning. You do realize that cocaine was first made illegal because congress was told that "cocaine niggers" (black men who used cocaine) became unstoppable monsters with superior aim with a handgun, right? Shortly after the New York Times published the story detailing how "the cocaine nigger sure is hard to kill," souther police forces began increasing the caliber of their standard issue handguns. Marijuana was made illegal under similar circumstances; it helped that industries that competed with the hemp industry put pressure on congress.

You think your rights have not been stomped on? Take a look around. The United States has police forces that can only be described as paramilitary squads. When the local cops are as heavily armed as a small army unit, we are in serious trouble. If you need something more concrete than the abstract, "militant police forces are a problem," consider this:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/interviews/wald.html

Yes, the obvious reading is the correct one: a police force that pays its own wages by seizing assets from drug dealers. This is not limited to Florida:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91490480

The only reason you do not perceive your rights being stomped on by the war on drugs is that it has been happening for so long now that you and most other people have generally forgotten that they ever had the rights they lost. Remember the days when the police had to obtain a warrant to search your home? Not anymore:

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/05/16/Warrantless-searches-expanded-in-drug-case/UPI-27821305557337/

It has gotten so bad that the DEA can now unilaterally declare a drug to be illegal for an entire year, without congressional approval:

http://www.dosenation.com/listing.php?smlid=8021

You used to be able to make large cash transactions in private; now that is automatically reported to the government, as part of an effort to crack down on drug dealers. Even so much as a misdemeanor drug offense now causes a person's right to buy a gun to be denied. Any company that does contracting work for the government is required, by law, to maintain a "drug free workplace." A drug offense can mean the loss of scholarships for students, regardless of their academic merit.

Your rights were trampled long ago, sir.

http://www.npr.org/2011/05/26/136690513/study-may-shed-light-on-how-to-stop-spam

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1493749

In some jurisdictions, flashing your lights has been interpreted as protected First Amendment speech. I'm pretty sure that you could take that pretty far up the appeals chain if necessary, too.

I remember that much about him as well. However, in the movie, his expended power manifests itself in several different ways -- from awesome energy shockwaves to power pellets he can deploy to flicks of a finger loaded with kinetic energy. I expected more of the latter -- that is, punches and other strikes disproportionately loaded with energy. I'm not complaining, but I just didn't have a very good feel for his power's mechanics.

I thought that Kevin Bacon, while not really resembling Shaw very well, still made a captivating villain. I especially enjoyed his brief depiction as a Nazi scientist at the very beginning of the movie. The latest Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me has a small but enjoyable interview with him regarding, among other things, his role as Shaw. :) And I can totally see see him with muttonchops!