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See Venezuela.

If you can catch a flight (kinda tough at the moment because the Government has effectively nationalized airline ticket revenue so the airlines have canceled most regular service) you might take a trip and stay if you like it so much.

Bring extra toilet paper.

energy, water, medical

All of the above has either been or is under imminent threat of nationalization. Lets look at the results;

Energy: Venezuelan president’s live speech about blackouts interrupted by blackouts
Water: Caracas Goes Thirsty as Taps Run Dry and Bottles Vanish
Medicine: Patients urged to show up at hospitals with their own disinfectant, gauze and pain killers

Yeah, because if there's one thing we can be sure of, it's that excessive government regulation has completely eliminated the chance of a knife-wielding taxi driver raping a passenger!

Oh wait...

No, but...

That's unpossible!

That's what I thought I remembered from reading The Hot Zone, but I think this strain might be a bit more virulent--there've evidently been reported cases of contracting the disease at funerals of infected individuals.

You are not buying stuff at the same price as 6 years ago, maybe you should actually pay attention to the receipts.

beef, pork, avocado, fruits, veggies, almonds, pinenuts, walnuts, mozarella, cheddar, other cheeses, seafood, grains, soy, soy, palm oil, milk, gasoline, beer and more beer, limes, canadian bacon, barley, restaurants, restaurants, restaurants,electrical energy, car rentals, hotel rooms, cab fairs,

air travel and air travel gets more expensive in many other ways, various extra fees, less room, more seats on planes

aluminium,

You no longer have to guess -- now you can ask these two.

Okay, find me a biased American reporter who writes articles asking Americans to sympathize with Al-Qaeda.

Maybe he is not a reporter but this guy is an American on al-Qaeda's side.

That should be enough evidence to show that the Israeli attack on Gaza more morally ambiguous than the American attack on Afghanistan.

Sorry but the opinions if two biased people don't make what they say true.

Okay, maybe in your mind the prisoner swap was unjust. But it was still legally binding.

It is common law that any contract signed under duress is null and void. I would say "Sign or we keep your soldier" would be considered duress.

You mean the tunnels that were built so that Gazans could smuggle in the fuel ...

And arms and rockets into Gaza. They will also be used, as Hamas has stated and is doing now, to strike at Israel.

Abbas has already said that he supports the Israeli bombings in Gaza

Do you have any reference for this statement?

Maybe the PLA would have caught the criminals if they had a real police force, but Israel will not allow them to maintain one.

Did you even look at the date of that report? That happened twenty years ago. Things have changed.

Fatah = Israeli military government 2.0.

So if Fatah is a sham then any coalition between Hamas and Fatah is also a sham. You can not have it both ways.

Israel has "warned" the civilians to leave, but the Egyptian border is closed, so where can they go?

They have not been told to leave all of the Gaza Strip. They have been told to leave certain areas where operations will be held. Operations outside those areas are in direct retaliation to Hamas rocket attacks. Maybe Hamas should stop using their own people and human shields?

Then ninety Palestinian civilians are dead. Ninety for three.

It is not just about the deaths of 3 Israelis. It is also about the launching of rockets into Israel. While they cause few deaths they cause great terror. Would you feel safe if at any moment a rocket or mortar round could fall out of the sky and kill you? Read this for some perspective. It is like poking a bear. If Hamas pokes Israel enough times with rockets and terrorist attacks they will be swatted by the IDF.

This is what will happen to you if you vote for Hamas. This is what we will do to you. Some democracy those West Bankers have, eh?

I see no problem with that. If the Palestinians vote for Hamas they are voting for more rocket attacks and more Israeli retaliation. If they vote for a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of Israel they deserve to bear the consequences of that vote. Showing those consequences is not a bad thing.

Don't forget our illustrious governor, who refuses to communicate with his staff via email, favoring phone calls and Blackberry Pin-to-Pin messaging instead, so as to sidestep records laws. I'm glad he's kept up on his promise to be the most transparent administration in state history. http://www.nydailynews.com/new... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07...

Also useful if you have to pay something and want to be a dick about it

He gave up his girlfriend and cushy job, he exposed clear evidence of violation of international treaties and the US Constitution by the world's dominant superpower, and then he endured being stuck in the Moscow Airport (there isn't enough Prozac in the world to make this OK) and is now stuck in Russia, which I assure you, is a severe downgrade from Hawaii.

Since it sounds like he really hasn't been in touch with her it looks more like he dumped his girlfriend. Why hasn't he invited his girlfriend to Russia?
He has stated that the only reason he took his "cushy job" was to steal classified documents:
      Snowden to newspaper: I took contractor job to gather evidence
Snowden couldn't be found in the airport for long stretches of time. Perhaps he was resting in a Russian supplied suite?
The simple truth is we know next to nothing about Snowden's living conditions in Russia, other than he is being protected by the FSB, who has no doubt had many chats with him, and his spokesman is on the FSB's public committee and a friend of Putin.

You'd have a great point if there were any reason we could trust the NSA.

You'd have a great point if there was any reason we could trust Snowden, a man who lied to friends, family, girlfriend, coworkers and the government to steal top secret documents and flee the country. The fact that he as leaked top secret documents doesn't make him trustworthy.

People do get killed by these things.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09...

http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

Please notice the qualification "steady flight". Birds are moving.

Drones are moving too. False distinction is false.

You can probably recognize a bird as such and thus gauge its size (as it is an object you would expect to encounter), whereas a drone could have any shape or color or may even be made to look like a typical helicopter scaled down. There's no a priori estimate of such an object's size.

It was a toy. It looked like a toy. And if the source linked in this story was something besides the NY Post, you might actually get useful information like the type of drone (a DGI Phantom 2), photos, or a video showing one of the defendants with his toy (screengrab).

They're the police, and due to their newly found paramilitary status are better able to keep us safe. Like from your dog. Did you know it was a threat? It is.. or was, that's why they shot and killed it when breaking into your house.

It's much worse than that.

Police illegally trespass onto your property and kill your dog in a fenced-off pen:

http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
"This was a 4-y, population-based, double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled trial. The primary outcome was fracture incidence, and the principal secondary outcome was cancer incidence."

Eating a lots of vegetables and fruits and mushrooms can also reduce cancer risk (see Dr. Joel Fuhrman's summary works like "Eat To Live" with many references). I've found by eating more fruits and vegetables that my skin tone has changed from pale to having more color (even in winter). Adequate iodine can also help prevent cancer.

Reducing risk of incidence is not the same as cure though. Sorry to hear about you father getting cancer. Once you get cancer, everything is iffy, so cancer is best avoided preventatively. Fasting may also help in some cancer situations, and it also helps with chemotherapy by protecting cells from the toxic chemicals (since fasting seems to causes many normal cells to go into a safe survival mode but cancer cells generally do not). And eating better may hope prevent recurrence. In general, the human body is always developing cancerous cells, but generally they are dealt with by the immune system. So boosting the immune system could help with some cancers and there are many ways to do that -- but again, it is all iffy once cancer is established.

See also for other ideas:
http://science-beta.slashdot.o...

I agree supplements and natural sunlight are probably better choices than tanning beds --although there may still be unknowns about how the skin reacts to sun or tanning beds and produces many compounds vs. supplements. I also agree conventional tanning beds are not tuned to give lots of vitamin D.That is unfortunate, even if they produce some. See also about other tanning choices (and supplement suggestions):
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
"If you choose to use a tanning bed, the Vitamin D Council recommends using the same common sense you use in getting sunlight. This includes:
Getting half the amount of exposure that it takes for your skin to turn pink.
Using low-pressure beds that has good amount of UVB light, rather than high-intensity UVA light."

BTW, if you look into chemotherapy for cancer, for many cancers you'll find it is of questionable value relative to the costs both in money and suffering, where is on average may add at most a couple months of life on average if that. Chemotherapy can apparently even sometimes make cancer worse:
http://www.nydailynews.com/lif...
"The scientists found that healthy cells damaged by chemotherapy secreted more of a protein called WNT16B which boosts cancer cell survival."

It's hard to know who to trust regarding medical research results or interpretations:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Marcia Angell)"

Good luck sorting it all out. I've suggested creating better tools for medical sensemaking, but still not time to work on them...

"Being black in a black neighborhood" isn't a chargeable offense. Unlawfully carrying a concealed weapon or drugs is.

Yes, but stopping and frisking people without legal grounds is a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And in the U.S., blacks get stopped in black neighborhoods all the time. Whites don't.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

Americans who condemn Cuba for oppression should spend some time condemning their own country for its oppression.

you would hope to see a little more healthy skepticism toward government-funded "science."

In the 21st century, 99% of all research is government funded. Diabetes study at Johns Hopkins? Money came from the NIH. Robotics research at Carnegie Mellon? Funded by NASA. Particle physics at Fermilab? NSF. This is even more true abroad.

Particularly when consensus is not so much a word as a fucking chant

It became a chant after the Koch brothers spent millions astro-turfing to raise "independent thinkers" (i.e. disgraced fringe scientists) with "insightful questions" (press statements written by Kock & Co.). What do you think would happen if five scientists at CERN (pockets lined with cash) started claiming that Higgs-Boson research was a massive conspiracy after ten years of conspicuous silence. Yeah, there would be plenty of "consensus" chanting then too. And before we get too far into accusing special interest groups of cooking up global warming, let's not forget that a Koch brother funded study actually came out in favor of the global warming theory.

the solution is always to give over more of your money and freedom to the governments who fund these findings

This is the same shit cigarette companies pulled when NIH-funded research started to show links between smoking and cancer. They're just trying to sell you nicotine patches, they said. They're just making excuses to raise cigarette taxes, they said. And for decades, idiots like you believed them.

What we do know is there have been warmer periods, colder periods, and CO2 has been around through all of it.

This is a perfect example of the inane bullshit that denialists say as if it proves a point. Guess what, there have times where there were lots of droughts, times when there were very few droughts, and there have been lakes and evaporation around through all of it. Does that prove that lakes and evaporation have nothing to do with droughts? No, you idiot. There are more droughts when lake water-levels and evaporation levels fall. Likewise there is more warming when CO2 increases.

Obviously, no.

Teacher, Mark Berndt, Pleads Guilty To Feeding Students Semen-Laced Cookies In Los Angeles School

Case against ex-Miramonte teacher Martin Springer dismissed

http://nypost.com/2014/05/13/notorious-pedophile-teacher-gave-victims-drug-laced-oreos/

Girl was victim of both teachers charged in L.A. child abuse cases: report

Mark Berndt: Profile of Perversion

Mark Berndt's $40,000 Payoff

LAUSD Molestations Spark Grim Federal Complaint

Berndt allegedly kept a jar of Vaseline on his desk which he used to masturbate in class, and sometimes wore a "freakish" Mickey Mouse costume with women's tights, the parents say. They claim the school's principal Martin Sandoval walked into the classroom as Berndt was videotaping students but let him off with a verbal warning. The parents claim LAUSD ignored those red flags and other instances of "freakish behavior." "LAUSD ignored multiple prior student complaints about Berndt and a district attorney investigation. LAUSD ignored parent complaints and failed to detect the massive number of lewd acts committed by at least three active child predators on one small campus for years," the complaint states.

Anderson Cooper 360 reports on why Teachers' Union killed a bill that would make it easier to fire SEXUAL PREDATORS in the classroom.

Just In: CA Ballot Initiative to Target Sex Abusers in Schools

Teacher puzzler: Part-time porn star fired, semen-feeder paid off

New York City is far from broke. It's one of the most taxed cities in the country. In fact it's the highest.

It figures it'd be the LAPD. What other police force on the west coast would hunger for this kind of invasiveness?

There is nothing on the west coast like the LAPD.

With 10,023 officers and 2,879 civilian staff, it is the third-largest local law enforcement agency in the United States, after the New York City Police Department and the Chicago Police Department. The department serves an area of 498 square miles (1,290 km2) and a population of 3,792,621 people as of the 2010 Census.

Los Angeles Police Department

LAPD acquires two drones, to consider employing them for 'narrow' use

The X6 is a spy drone with wireless video and still cameras (in hi-def, infra-red and 0 lux flavors) that can fly autonomously, or as a remote-controlled bot. It has 11 sensors (including gyros, accelerometers, barometers, magnetometers and GPS) and is so easy to pilot, a Wii gamer could do it. Now it will be used by the Ontario Provincial Police and the Saskatoon Police to patrol crime scenes and help gather evidence.

The Draganflyer X6 UAV Police Edition

[March 2009]

You can be "stopped by" all the time. ( Not that I agree that they should be allowed to do that, but such is the law - get the law changed. ) Being stopped by doesn't mean being searched. And searched doesn't necessarily mean searched without consent. etc.

You obviously don't know what you're talking about, friend.

I never said it was legal or constitutional. Police abuse is rampant, and people's rights are being violated. You can blather on about refusing a search if you want, but if you find yourself getting stopped/frisked, good luck with that.

Check this out as well.

External reality check, is your town so filled with psychopaths that some petty thief will KILL your ass rather than hand back the phone?

Yes.

So you're saying a justice system shouldn't try to be any better than criminals?

Agree. This is the slippery slope that leads to barbaric systems like Sharia, with stoning for adultery, death for professing belief in other religions, and so on.

Or beating people up because they are different Five Hasidic Jews Arrested for Williamsburg Attack on Gay Man

Or because they don't follow your rules Ultra-Orthodox Israeli couple sparks riot after telling woman to move to the back of a public bus

If they had laws saying that people had to stay at the back of the bus or that they had to be beaten up then you'd have a point

Or beating people up because they are different Five Hasidic Jews Arrested for Williamsburg Attack on Gay Man

Or because they don't follow your rules Ultra-Orthodox Israeli couple sparks riot after telling woman to move to the back of a public bus

Like that bastard Andrew Cuomo, the Governor of New York! He avoids email entirely in favor of phone conversations or Blackberry pin-to-pin messages, so there's no record of anything that goes on. Wait, no, he's a Democrat. Thank God, then, it must be perfectly OK.

I just came across Canada stabbing victims identified as students: ‘They were all good kids’. The dichotomy is intriguing:

Bang Bang You're Dead is a great way to explore the question, "What if this dichotomy were wrong?" Now, I don't mean to assert that victims always match the pattern in Bang Bang. Sometimes people lash out at folks who had nothing to do with their pain. But sometimes they do. And when we assert (1) and (2), we sometimes depart from a true description of the situation. Do we care about this?

The idea that merely removing guns from the populace will stop the 'badness' which leads to a good proportion of mass murder is delusional. It'll merely suppress visibility of the problem. Sadly, many are just fine with this. Treating the symptoms is easier than treating the cause. False dichotomies are easier than uncomfortable tensions.

according to another article on this subject The student said "Like, I'd always go home or tell my mom that this is happening, but I don't actually have anything to show for it. So it was kind of like, basically my voice wasn't being heard and I wanted some help. So it wasn't, like, I — this wasn't just a one-time thing. This always happens every day in that class."

The Student did try to report it, but felt ignored and helpless.

This is an unusual event because its part of a series of 4 lunar eclipses in a row (in subsequent 6 full moon cycles), a tetrad which occurs once per 33 years on average. The term 'blood moon' is sometimes used for a lunar eclipse, but it's been popularised for this tetrad by John Hagee to promote his book and claim that it means the end of the world.

If any pope were to do that, it would be this f-bomb dropping guy, prophesized to be the final pope.

Yeah .. could be real fun

Tenant uses Airbnb.com, leads to unexpected sex party that trashes his Chelsea luxury apartment

BTW

I'd rather not have computer assist.

Ice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

Bad Maintenance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroper%C3%BA_Flight_603

Defective systems
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/asiana-airlines-december-plane-crash-partially-caused-faulty-warning-systems-article-1.1740576

over reliance on technology
http://www.today.com/news/are-airline-pilots-relying-too-much-automation-1B11170594

computer problems
http://www.stratfordbeaconherald.com/2013/08/14/two-dead-in-ups-cargo-jet-crash-in-birmingham-ala

Also, as a programmer, I assure you that the code running your systems in the cockpit still has bugs. They usually won't show up until certain conditions are met - the old "Q:Why didn't you catch this in testing? A: Because it worked fine on my machine".

In a forecast, I'm thinking Firefox will probably become more popular as a result of this. Why? Because most people don't react well to negative activism; negative activism tends to rally the supporters. Look at chic-fil-a, they had record sales after the EXACT same thing happened to them, and in fact they are now more profitable than ever.

That, and activists tend to be snobish assholes that people end up hating more than what the activists are trying to get everybody else to hate. Just ask this guy:

http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

Nice guy my ass. I guarantee you that he's a total prick to everybody he's around because he berates them for everything he doesn't like about them, but he still thinks he's a nice guy anyways and that it's ok to berate people for things you perceive as bad. It's not, in fact it makes you a douchebag.

Wonder what the problem is? You tell me....

You better ride that on a very smooth surface or you're going to break it into the first hole in the pavement. And I don't mean this http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix... but this http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

In other news no-one should care about, Cheney has blamed Ukraine's invasion on Obama and George Zimmerman has released a video about how he's a great guy.

I wonder how often something like this happens and we never hear about it, because the "second dash cam video" doesn't exist or never comes to light.

Where in the US constitution is it mandated that I be my brothers keeper....by force?

We mandate lots of things that aren't in the US constitution.

As Adam Smith said, when you benefit from a society, you have an obligation to pay the costs of running that society.

Adam Smith knew about epidemics. We have to cooperate to build hospitals that care for everyone as a last resort. It would be nice if everybody contributed those costs voluntarily.

But they don't. Some people become freeloaders. They know we're going to have to take care of them whether they pay their share or not, so they don't pay. A few freeloaders can encourage everybody to stop cooperating. Then we won't have hospitals for anybody. So if the freeloaders don't pay, we have to make them pay.

If you had a 4-year-old child who got cancer, whose life could only be saved by a $100,000 drug, you'd be demanding that the government, or somebody, give your child that drug. http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

So we have to make you pay your share now of the cost of running society. You don't have any choice.

he U.S. has an infant mortality rate that dwarfs comparable nations, as well as the highest teenage-pregnancy rate in the developed world, largely because of the politically-motivated unavailability of contraception in many areas."

Seriously? I don't know of anywhere in the US where contraception is not available. They sell rubbers at all drug stores and most every grocery store I've ever been to. I'm born and raised in the south of the US, and I've never seen anywhere that doesn't have multiple forms of contraception unavailable with or without a prescription. There are no cities I know of that ban them by law.

While condoms have useful purposes, they have a contraceptive failure rate of about 1% a year. A gynecologist at a medical school once told me that for women who absolutely must not get pregnant, she prescribes either the contraceptive loop or the hormone implants, both of which must be inserted by a doctor. Another reliable method is the pill, which must be prescribed by a doctor. The cheapest place to get this is usually a Planned Parenthood clinic. Otherwise it might cost $1-2,000

Throughout the South, politicians have been closing down Planned Parenthood clinics. Romney said that he will do anything he can to shut down Planned Parenthood. http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

They've also been trying to exclude contraceptives from health insurance under a religious exemption. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

I've also noticed that when I see a list of states with their incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, Mississippi and Alabama are usually at the top of the list.

The infant mortality and maternal mortality is pretty high in the U.S. in general and throughout the South in particular. Yes, Rolling Stone was correct.

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, were the most generous American philanthropists in 2013, with a donation of 18 million shares of Facebook stock, valued at more than $970 million, to a Silicon Valley nonprofit in December.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

That non-profit?
Silicon Valley Community Foundation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"Regional Planning: This includes plans related to both land use and mass transit options in the Silicon Valley area.[15][20]"

As well as being a great tax tool it appears to exert influence in required areas.

Incredibly, though, this one is still working as a riveter as of about 5 months ago.

Great post. All too true.

If those that say they support the troops, put their money (or ours, taxpayer, money) where their mouths are, than they would pre-fund the medical and psychiatric needs of our veterans BEFORE they put a boot on the ground overseas.

If they are unwilling to fund the clean-up, than what the heck are they sending are service men and women overseas in the first place.

Hey these HAWKS, required the US Postal Service to pre-fund retirement for 75 years in the future. (I don't agree with that, but they did it, didn't they! So what is their excuses...if they support our troops? Right? They just are trying to force it USPS to fail to get at that ever growing pile of cash. And they are miserly with the money when it comes to taking care of our returning veterans.

We Americans seem to forget the many lessons of history, two that come to mind are Maj Gen Smedley Butler and President Eisenhower. I know you know his famous quotes about the military industrial complex and he was certainly in a position to understand and know the facts.

You can't convince me that they are so inept that they can not create a budget, yet only the Dems have done that in recent history (ie. President Clinton). However not even the Democrats have balanced the budget since then.

We need a third party that is not bought and paid for. And an educated population to stop voting for the insane (those doing the same thing and expecting a different result) and work toward a positive change for the better!

Quick to waste $24 Billion for nothing and not willing to fully fund the needs of our veterans...are you kidding me?

We must remember that the Tea Party got co-opted within a month or two tops as that was when the paid shills in buses started rolling into events. Pathetic. So a third party can not be influenced or controlled by the 9% that own 90% of the wealth of this Country.

I know I am not alone in wondering who the Tea Party thought they were, to unilaterally push the Republicans into not providing a balanced budget, to pay bills already created, ultimately costing American taxpayers well over $24 Billion in additional deficit. Even if deficits do not matter, the heck with them for running it up higher for no valid reason, any politican that does this, should be removed from office, hopefuly their constiuants will wise up before it happens again. They run it up by going to war too, pathetic, and then they blame the other party, are you kidding, enough. You are not fooling the majority of us anymore with your lies.

Pay your bills, lord knows we have too, or we lose everything.

The veterans in my family fought and died so their descendants could be free. It is unacceptable to their ultimate sacrifice that any members of our family settle for so much less that the Republicans, Tea Party, Libertarians and Democrats give us. Pathetic.

Lets see all politicians budget and govern successfully for a change! It would be refreshing.

Unfortunately those that send our men and women to war, do not really care about them, else they would fund the medical expenses for them before they came home. Yet war after war, they do not do this. Since they are being used, wrongly per Maj Gen Smedley Butler, perhaps those businesses that are the beneficiaries should put up as most of them don't pay taxes anyway. Not that I would be for this, but better to hold them responsible, and not get off scott free as they have for hundreds of years already.

I see this as critical in a driverless car. There needs to be a way for people to pull the plug and there needs to be a way for people to phone in an emergency. So if someone is lying in a pothole being run over by car after car, or the bridge is failing, there needs to be a way for 911 to say that a stretch of road is now cut off. The key is that this cannot be ab abusable by officials. I do not want my car grinding to a halt because the police are looking for some runaway or a bank was robbed.

Or the Governor doesn't like the Mayor of a particular city.

Some lawyers (particularly the ones dealing with political unlikeables, like the Gitmo remnants)....

Not every lawyer intervening on behalf of terrorists has discharged their responsibilities in a lawful manner.

Conviction of disbarred lawyer Lynne Stewart upheld for smuggling messages to jailed terrorist

Are you smarter than an 8th grader in 1912?

It seems cops in NY could certainly use some serious reining-in. In this incident, an officer allegedly kicked and broke the leg of a 10-YO boy who used his mother's phone to video record them, and then also sexually assaulted the mother.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

There's certainly interactions between cops and citizens that go badly, but this story sounds flimsy, and the video..

The cell phone captured sounds and voices during the confrontations but the video image is herky-jerky from the struggle.

It's currently she-said / cops-say.

I have no doubt the kid got injured in the struggle, but the whole thing doesn't add up as presented. The entire article is written from the viewpoint of the allegations against the police.

*shrug*

We'll see.

It seems cops in NY could certainly use some serious reining-in. In this incident, an officer allegedly kicked and broke the leg of a 10-YO boy who used his mother's phone to video record them, and then also sexually assaulted the mother.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

Cretins like that would use Google Glass as a tool of oppression to aid with blackmail, extortion, and control of the population under their purview.

But as bad as thugs like that are, I'll bet even *they* say "Fuck Slashdot Beta!".

Strat

Depends on which side you're on...

Does not matter, same story of politicians bribed, lobbyists behind closed doors present their wishes and common folks get screwed - in some cases for 1/2 a century:

https://friendsofthecoloradopu...

They have a "Privatization Board" there!!!

It's a total money game selling one's butt to be used at the payers liking. Isn't that called prostitution and generally prohibited in most states in the US? Maybe not at the Capitol, I'll have to check on that.

In effect, that means that the winning Senate candidates needed to raise an average of $14,351 every day between Jan. 1 2010 and election day, 2012 in order to pull of a win, while the victorious House members raised $2.315 per day, MapLight found.

From: http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

If you want to see what American fascism would look like, well this is it.

Honestly, if this is what American fascism looks like, then American fascism looks silly and weak.

Look, I'm all about fairness. I think both sides of the political divide should be subject to the same level of government scrutiny. Preferentially enforcing laws on one group and not another is a kind of discrimination.

At the same time, some of your examples are some really sketchy Republicans.

James O’Keefe - You mean the guy who put out a doctored video in order to deceitfully sway public opinion? http://mediamatters.org/resear...

Dinesh D’Souza - If he's guilty, he's guilty. I mean it's not like Republicans haven't done underhanded and shadey things in the past, so I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if D'Sousa was doing illegal things. For example, how about this story about how Republicans repeatedly called a voter-pickup telephone number so that they could stop real (mostly democratic) voters from getting to the election polls on the day of an election? http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

In October 2002, Charles McGee, executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party, was mailed a Democratic flier that offered Election Day rides to the polls. The circular listed telephone numbers of party offices in five cities and towns.

"I paused and thought to myself, I might find out -- I might think of an idea of disrupting those operations," McGee later testified.... When voting began Nov. 5, McGee's plan worked like a charm. For two crucial hours, an Idaho telecommunications firm tied up Democratic and union phone lines, bringing their get-out-the-vote plans to a halt. The effort helped John E. Sununu (R) win his Senate seat by 51 to 47 percent, a 19,151-vote margin.

McGee and two other participants -- Republican National Committee regional political director James Tobin and GOP consultant Allen Raymond-- have been found guilty of criminally violating federal communications law. Tobin will be sentenced today in U.S. District Court in Concord, N.H.

Or how about New Jersey governor's latest trick of shutting down traffic lanes to punish a mayor who wouldn't endorse him for governor? http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

How about the North Carolina's admission (on camera) that election changes were being pushed forward, not because of voter fraud, but rather, to "kick democrat's butts" (i.e. stop Democratic voters from actually voting). Jump to 3:30: http://www.thedailyshow.com/wa...

If your examples are examples of "fascism", then how is this also not an example of "fascism" coming from Republicans?

Republicans have used a lot of dirty tricks to win elections, so it's not really surprising that they'd end up in the crosshairs of investigations.

Ryan Loskarn, former chief of staff to Tennessee's Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, was into little boys.

I would rather walk 30 meters on a cobblestone road to my local shop, surrounded by thousand year-old architecture, then spend 30 seconds in a car suffocated in concrete and traffic.

It's not an option to select. Not here, at least. Many US roads are not designed for walking. You can be killed by a car, or arrested for jaywalking. There are no sidewalks on many roads. The road that I live on does not have sidewalks for at least 5 miles. It's just a property of the locale. You can, of course, find a place to live that is more designed for walking... it's called ghetto. You will find plenty of people walking there. Just don't come close to them. IMO, 50 miles would be a good, safe distance.

The food too is not even comparable for the crap that passes in the U.S. In Europe, you can be relatively poor and live like a king.

Well, the only way to eat reasonably healthy food here is either to cook it for yourself, or to pay big bucks for dinner at a good restaurant. (Note: Olive Garden and Red Lobster do not qualify. At Denny's you can be assaulted. I do not even know where a good, not franchised, restaurant might be nearby.)

Almost everything you purchase is locally grown, locally made, and locally sold. It's a completely different way of living that Americans don't understand.

In the USA you will find megastores, megaparking, and megaconsumption. Those tiny stores would have a hard time surviving. They wouldn't have access to anything local because in most places there is nothing local. Territories specialize in something, and that's it. When I buy apples, they likely were grown a thousand miles away, if not more. I have lemons in my backyard, and plums, and peaches, and some apples (in season.) Those are local. Everything else is coming from all over the world.

Who in their right mind would spend 30 minutes in a store? You don't have to do that Europe. Most of your shopping consists of little artisan shops that provide local produce, cheese, wine, meats, and takes you only a minute to order.

Our stores can easily be 100 x 100 meters long. It will take you a while to get to the right shelf even if you know where it is. However every store has its own layout, even stores of the same company.

If you live your life going from point A to point B, you will find it severely lacking. You miss out on the good stuff. You will consequently have fewer friends, less sex, and fewer thoughts.

It is often said that work, work and more work is a national obsession of americans. Europeans are laughed at for taking long vacations and working sparingly. I, personally, prefer to work; not necessarily for the man - I have plenty of hobbies. But none of them involve socialization. I deal with machines - they can be trusted. Humans... maybe in some parallel Universe.

Case in point: When I lived in Europe, I got a little something extra from the baker's cute daughter. :)

I hope that it was easily treatable. Modern medicine is pretty good :-)

Millions of data is take every day and even after a guy makes a bomb threat to the police and the airline, he still is able to get on a plane.

Did you not even read TFS? Electronics weren't being imported, rare-earth magnets were. We're still capable of building our own electronics, we just can't do it as cheaply as the Chinese.

Is it about price? Or is it about corrupt lobbyists?

It can cost 10x as much as another contractor! But ... if you have millions to bribe the congress and the president they will be happy to waste tax payer money.

Did you know Pakistan (as in the government) pays off our politicians all the time to influence US policy agaisn't our own interests.

The fact is the American government represents everyone but Americans as corporate interests. Doesn't matter which party, but the democrats at least happen to believe the world is older than 5,000 years old so I lean towards them but they are corrupt. The republicans believe those silly things so they can promise oil and defense contractor lobbyist that they can twist church goers into thinking they are voting for God by voting for these Chinese contracts etc.