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"Shareholder capitalism is the doctrine that companies exist solely to make money for their shareholders. It is frequently contrasted with stakeholder capitalism, which holds that companies exist for the benefit of their customers, workers and communities, not just for ever-fluctuating number of mostly remote and unengaged passive investors who just happen to own stock in them, often without even being aware that they do.

"The rise of shareholder capitalism in the U.S. is often dated to an influential article in the Journal of Financial Economics in 1976, titled “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure” by Michael C. Jensen and William H. Meckling. They argued that shareholders should demand higher returns from complacent corporate managers. The idea of shareholder value was publicized by a 1981 speech in New York by Jack Welch, who had just taken over General Electric, and by Aflred Rappaport’s 1986 book “Creating Shareholder Value.”

"The shareholder value movement sought to persuade corporate managers to ignore the interests of all stakeholders like workers, customers and the home country, other than shareholders. Granting CEOs stock options, in addition to salaries, was supposed to align their interests with those of the shareholders.

"The theory had an obvious problem: Who are the shareholders and what are their interests? Most publicly traded companies have shares that are bought and sold constantly on behalf of millions of passive investors by mutual funds and other intermediates. Some shareholders invest in a company for the long term; many others allow their shares to be bought and sold quickly by computer software programs.

"Unable to identify what particular shareholders want, CEOs with the encouragement of Wall Street have treated short-term earnings as a reliable proxy for shareholder value. (...)

"Shareholder value capitalism in the U.S. since the 1980s has even failed in its primary purpose — maximizing the growth in shareholder value. As Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman Business School at the University of Toronto points out in a recent Harvard Business Review article, between 1933 and 1976 shareholders of American companies earned higher returns — 7.6 percent — than they have done in the age of shareholder value from 1977 to 2008 — 5.9 percent a year.

"For his part, Jack Welch has renounced the idea with which he was long associated. In a March 2009 interview with the Financial Times, the former head of GE said: “Strictly speaking, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.”

"In the aftermath of the failed 40-year experiment in shareholder capitalism, Americans need not look solely to other democratic nations for models of successful stakeholder capitalism. The U.S. economy between the New Deal and the 1970s was a version of stakeholder capitalism, in which the gains from superior growth were shared with workers, CEOs were moderately paid and the rich engrossed far less of the economy. In reconnecting with America’s native tradition of stakeholder capitalism, American companies can learn from the example of Johnson & Johnson, whose credo was written by Robert Wood Johnson in 1943:

"We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.We are responsible to our employees, the men and women who work with us throughout the world.We are responsible to the countries in which we live and work and to the world community as wellWe must be good citizens.and bear our fair share of taxes.We must maintain in good order the property we are privileged to use, protecting the environment and natural resources.Our final responsibility is to our shareholders.When we operate according to these principles, the shareholders should realize a fair return."

The failure of shareholder capitalism, Salon, Mar 29, 2011

You gotta vote for people who will make it so

Oh, I am voting for such people alright. But the last couple of elections I was overruled by the inane majority, who consider the color of a candidate's skin more important, than his qualifications.

Our "affirmative action" President plays golf with big cable CEO(s), and the rest of his party is in the big media's pocket as well.

Meanwhile, the rank-and-file partisans are encouraged to hate the Kochs brothers...

Do you honestly believe that someone would be allowed to run for president of the USA who wasn't in big media's pocket?

You gotta vote for people who will make it so

Oh, I am voting for such people alright. But the last couple of elections I was overruled by the inane majority, who consider the color of a candidate's skin more important, than his qualifications.

Our "affirmative action" President plays golf with big cable CEO(s), and the rest of his party is in the big media's pocket as well.

Meanwhile, the rank-and-file partisans are encouraged to hate the Kochs brothers...

Speaking of Manhattan, as predicted, the West Side Highway in New York is currently under water. It's a tragedy we didn't listen sooner.

I seem to recall it being quite wet there a year or two ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rdeMCkmUs4

Speaking of Manhattan, as predicted, the West Side Highway in New York is currently under water. It's a tragedy we didn't listen sooner.

Or beating the spouse into submission
at least that's how it works in Islam.

Apparently you didn't get the message. The last acceptable form of bigotry in the US is against evangelical Christians.

Oh yes, they do claim that. Jimmy Wales asserts that Wikipedia is "about as accurate as traditional encyclopedias and improving all the time." Really? Really? Really? Really? Really?

Back in 2005, Wikipedia was studied for accuracy against the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And they were found to be about the same. Since then Wikipedia has improved a lot, and they've stopped printing the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The 2005 "study" comparing Britannica and Wikipedia was not a rigorous peer-reviewed study, and they only looked at articles on relatively obscure science topics – a fact that no one seems to remember these days. The average Wikipedia vandal would not even know how to find an entry on a topic like the “kinetic isotope effect” or “Meliaceae” (two of the articles they looked at).

The assertion that Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica is ludicrous. Granted, it's a lot bigger than Britannica, and has articles on breaking news stories, but as reliable? Of the English Wikipedia's nearly 5 million articles, at least 10% are on no Wikipedia editor's watchlist – a result of the continuous increase in the number of articles combined with the continuous decrease in the number of active editors – and those articles are sitting ducks for subtle vandalism.

Britannica may have had errors, but it did not contain false information inserted by anonymous people for fun or for financial gain; it contained no anonymous hatchet jobs written by people's rivals, and was not full of puff-pieces written by the biography subjects themselves.

Repeating this false "Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica" meme only contributes to future cases like this one here, or this one.

You might find the intro of this book of interest (just noticed it today) as it talks about the conflict between scarcity and post-scarcity ideas, including market failures and market-based solutions: http://books.google.com/books?...
"Sustainable Growth in a Post-Scarcity World: Consumption, Demand, and the Poverty Penalty -- by Philip Sadler"

IMHO, universities have an implicit moral obligation (including "in loco parentis") to be candid and as accurate as possible with their students about things like career prospects; that they fail to do so as evidenced by this issue is problematical whatever the reasons (including "selection bias" that you only see relatively successful academics working in universities and the advice they give may have worked for them decades ago but may not be very useful either now or for other personality types).

If you look at other countries like in Western Europe, there is not as much of a conflict between being reasonable "successful" in a field and having a family and hobbies and such. Example: http://www.salon.com/2010/08/2...
"Germany's workers have higher productivity, shorter hours and greater quality of life. How did we get it so wrong? ... But even before the recession, American workers were already clocking in the most hours in the West. Compared to our German cousins across the pond, we work 1,804 hours versus their 1,436 hours â" the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour workweeks per year. The Protestant work ethic may have begun in Germany, but it has since evolved to become the American way of life. ... In comparison to the U.S., the Germans live in a socialist idyll. They have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, nursing care, and childcare. ... How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans. ..."

Various studies show that overwork does not make people more productive in the long term. Lots of things suffer -- including creativity. Overwork in the USA is a cultural pathology. BTW, it is also problematical to try to motivate the best creative work via rewards:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

As for technological innovation, there is a lot of discussion related to that by people like Langdon Winner and E.F. Schumacher (including related to "appropriate technology"). Just look at how US federal dollars went as subsidies via land grand colleges to big agriculture research vs. small farm research. Why were research funds for decades going into ever bigger mechanized harvesting operations and related plant varieties (the tasteless tomato) instead of multi-purpose flexible agricultural robotics useful for small farms and heirloom seeds? Why is funding "Seed Savers" heirloom seed production (seeds with a variety of natural resistance and good nutrition) or remineralizing US soils via ground up rock dust not one of the USA's top defense priorities vs. defending long supply lines of imported oil used to create monocultures propped up in dead soil doused in petro-chemical-derived synthetic fertilizers and pesticides?
http://www.seedsavers.org/
http://remineralize.org/

Markets may be good at producing certain types of abundance, but in the absence of political oversight, markets are pro

It could affect water supply. And food supply. And through those indirect means, lead to famine and want.

For example: the privitization of the water supply. Or, how a fundamental human need is becoming a priviliedge, instead of a right:
http://www.salon.com/2014/10/0...

No, you're doing it all wrong. What you need to do with facts that disagree with State Department propaganda is to lazily label them as conspriacy theories and call it a day.

Would that be this article from Salon?

If it’s all a "liberal" conspiracy, what are they trying to gain?

All people already in government would gain increased governmental control over the citizenry's lives — the vast majority of them believe, they "know better" than their subjects — bless our little hearts — how to live. Which is why you haven't yet seen a "green" measure proposed, that reduced that control, have you?

In addition, the "green" measures cause the Capitalism to slow down — a cause dear to the Illiberals and the foreign handlers of some of them. Seriously, scratch a "green" activist, and you'll find a Che Guevara T-shirt underneath...

I can see what you get to gain by denying the problem exists

Could you be more specific? What do I get to gain? Do you suppose, I — or the KKKoch brothers — have a wonderful new planet for ourselves (or our children) to emigrate to, when Earth becomes too polluted? Some kind of Elysium being built for the 1%?

It must've been around 2007, since googling for 'freeman dyson genetics' brings me to these articles.

Anyway, his argument might best be summed up with his own words:
"I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized."

Superfly was supposed to be French.

However this is just you lying. 4mbps is not "enough" for the modern Internet.

You are quite right to put "enough" in quotes. What I don't understand is, how you can seriously accuse anyone of lying (without quotes) on a matter as subjective as this.

The minimum needs to keep rising.

Sure. And it will — when multiple providers begin competing with each other for each home. Until then, attempting to force incumbent monopolies to improve service will remain a losing proposition — they talk directly to the powers that be and, being a monopoly, aren't afraid to lose many customers.

Meanwhile, the popular anger is directed against the Koch brothers — the favorite target of fans of government's regulations.

As a prime subscriber for the free shipping already I'll be very happy with just a few new 'TV' shows in genres that I enjoy.

> Not launch missiles from (or store them in) a school or hospital? No other countries military does that.

Actually false.
Amnesty International investigated the last time such claimes were made, back in 2008, and found that not only is that a myth, but the Israel used palestinians as human shields. And that was after the Israeli supreme court ruled that the IDF had to stop using palestinians civilians as human shields in 2005.

> Or, not launch missiles right next to the hotel where journalists are staying

As the video says in an abandoned plot of land roughly the entire length of a football field away from the hotel. Not from a school, not from a hospital -- an empty lot 100+ meters away from the hotel.

It is Gaza after all, with 1.8 million people in just 137 square miles it isn't like there are many open fields.

Here, the last-mile providers are acting like Marxists.

They certainly are — thanks to the monopoly-power once given to them by the government.

The solution to this, however, is not creating more rules for them to follow (with more boards and commissions to — ineffectively — ensure compliance) — these only make it harder for a would-be newcomers to appear — but to make this market properly competitive.

So screw the Koch Brothers and their idiot shilling.

While the public anger is (somewhat clumsily, but still effectively) once again redirected against the Koch Brothers, "Big Cable" donates to the ruling party en masse, CEOs play golf with the President and otherwise do the ruling party's bidding. Is it likely, that further monopolization will be blocked?

Hmm, Kaiser. Where have I heard that name before? Oh, I remember: in the Nixon tapes when he's discussing HMO's, which in turn created the largest rise in healthcare costs in the entire history of the United States! Well now that there is sure an unbiased source, yesiree Bob!

An Anonymous Coward does an ad hominem attack without bothering to see if his nay saying has any credibility. How useful.

You could have done a simple Google search

Advancements in medicine (drugs) have reduced crime (they have almost eliminated the need for insane asylums)

Tell that to all the homeless schizophrenics on the street due to deinstitutionalization. We have not eliminated the need for forced institutionalization we have limited it some but mental health is a seriously neglected part of american society. Here's a less sensational article if you don't like the other one.

For some real-world examples of made-up Wikipedia information entering other sources, sometimes to the major embarrassment of the people who reused it without checking, see two recent articles: How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia and I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax. It happens quite a lot, at least in the English Wikipedia, that hoaxes stay around for years before they are discovered, by which time they have entered all sorts of other sources (remember the Bicholim conflict?). Even people who work for Wikipedia tell you not to trust it, but to check the underlying citations.

It would help if the English Wikipedia had edits by new and unregistered users looked at and approved by more experienced Wikipedians before showing them to the public (that's how it's done in the German and Polish Wikipedias for example), but the English Wikipedia community has steadfastly refused to introduce that system ("Pending Changes", also known as "Flagged Revisions") in all of its articles, saying it would be too much work and be a downer for new contributors who might have to wait a while before they see their changes go live.

For examples of Wikipedia being abused for personal vendettas against people, see Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia and The tale of Mr Hari and Dr Rose: A false and malicious identity is admitted. Anonymity encourages this sort of thing, of course. Again, Pending Changes would have helped a little ...

The Wikimedia Foundation has so far not really cared very much about content quality. They do not measure it, and don't know how to, by their own admission. Their metrics of success are the number of articles, the number of editors, the number of edits (more is better!), the number of page views (Alexa!), and how many millions in donations they take. Little if any of this money goes towards measuring and improving quality. Most of it is spent on their software engineering and product development department, which represents two-thirds of the 200 or so Wikimedia staff. They are approaching Wikipedia more like Facebook than an educational project. Quality assessment and real-time quality control, the job of sifting through all the millions of contributions, is left to all the volunteers, who are stretched ... and unlike the Wikimedia Foundation staff (many of whom are not really skilled professionals, but simply Wikipedians who have managed to join the gravy train), they are not getting paid. Short version: The Wikimedia Foundation now takes $50 million a year in donations (compared to just $2.5 million six or seven years ago), and they don't really know what to do with it. It's not making Wikipedia a more reliable reference source.

Will you be among the best and brightest serving arrest warrants in barricaded drug houses to heavily armed drug dealers?

The cops think they're in a Steven Seagal movie, too. Allow me to excerpt one paragraph:

In 2010 a massive Maricopa County SWAT team, including a tank and several armored vehicles, raided the home of Jesus Llovera. The tank in fact drove straight into Llovera’s living room. Driving the tank? Action movie star Steven Seagal, whom Sheriff Joe Arpaio had recently deputized. Seagal had also been putting on the camouflage to help Arpaio with his controversial immigration raids. All of this, by the way, was getting caught on film. Seagal’s adventures in Maricopa County would make up the next season of the A&E TV series Steven Seagal, Lawman.
Llovera’s suspected crime? Cockfighting.

Believe me, there's a lot more where that came from. If you have the attention span and the interest, the whole article is worth reading. But the truth is, it's almost never a "barricaded" anything, just people living their lives. Especially in these sleepy southern towns, where a lot of this SWAT nonsense goes on.

Literally busted out laughing...

I'm just gonna leave this here

I sorta second the "marketing purposes" asking for ZIP.

You can usually refuse this, and besides that, about 50% of the time they ask you for zip after the transaction has gone through anyway. They can read Track 1 of your card, which includes your name. Name + zip is a decent proxy for unique ID, and Axciom probably has your name anyway.

How America’s immigration wars were poisoned by the military-industrial complex

How America’s immigration wars were poisoned by the military-industrial complex

You all remember the recent smallpox discovery at the NIH ... well it turns out they found quite a number of samples of various other things, and their disposition was somewhat odd: some of them went to the FDA, the CDC, or were destroyed, but a number of samples (they didn't say what) were sent to Homeland Security.

WTF?!

What possible business can H.S. have with vials of deadly diseases?

'The original smallpox samples, along with ten others that were unclearly labeled, were securely transferred to the CDC’s high-containment facility in Atlanta., the FDA said, and 32 other vials have already been destroyed. The remaining 279 were transferred to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Bioforensic Analysis Center “for safeguarding.”'

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/1...

Regardless of what you think of Amazon and them being a monopoly, Apple colluded with publishers to raise the price of ebooks. It was anti-competitive at it's core and it's illegal under US law. Not to even mention that it cost the average US buyer $5 per book.

Too bad (for your argument that is) that in reality ebook prices actually fell in all stores but Amazon. Even on Amazon, only those Amazon had sold below price rose in price. Provable fact.http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304355104579236261045331876 (paywalled) http://www.salon.com/2014/01/12/amazons_bogus_anti_apple_crusade/

Not buying it without some sort of citation.

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/0... http://qz.com/127861/its-time-... http://usatoday30.usatoday.com... http://fortune.com/2013/09/20/... http://www.mhpbooks.com/indepe... Those were just the first few results from a simple google search. Why is it that every time someone asks for a citation, the "proof" is the first hit from a simple google search? In this case: "number of bookstores in the USA".

Hrrm. Pretty much all only deal with what seems to be opportunistic growth after the fall of Borders since 2009, and based on the same American Booksellers Association data. Assuming these numbers reflect the reality and are a constant percentage of all total bookstores in the USA, it still only deals with a recent phenominon with obvious cause, and even then "The current total is less than half the 1990s peak of around 4,000." Although amounts vary, everything else I've seen says the same thing, the number of bookstores is going down.

Not buying it without some sort of citation.

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/0...
http://qz.com/127861/its-time-...
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com...
http://fortune.com/2013/09/20/...
http://www.mhpbooks.com/indepe...

Those were just the first few results from a simple google search. Why is it that every time someone asks for a citation, the "proof" is the first hit from a simple google search? In this case: "number of bookstores in the USA".

Re Carter http://www.salon.com/2013/07/1...
It was an interesting decade with Halloween Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I really know nothing about how Amazon works internally, so perhaps you can enlighten me.

how do they manage to do such great things with software?

By ripping off Android for their mobile platform and then screwing developers who sign their awful agreement?

How do they manage to operate such a huge warehousing and logistics operation?

By allegedly exploiting and shorting their employees and having soulless fulfillment centers/neo-sweatshops?

How about we just use nuclear power for most cases because it's more efficient, safer, etc.?

How about we just use electric cars for most cases because they're simpler, more efficient, etc.?

How about we just stop using coal because it's fucking terrible all around?

If the obvious issue of climate change can't overcome the inertia (that is, the supporters of those technologies refuse to change even to the point that their refusal is endangering millions of lives and impoverishing billions yet to come), then minor, less justifiable reasons will not get them to change.

Why do we need a climate change bullshit bogey man to get politicians to stop blocking natural progress?

Errr. A few dozen bloggers and paid shills on the internet can't actually convert an established scientific theory from a fact into a fictional bogeyman. Sorry, but we don't live in a world of magic. This video summarises the actual debate better than anything I have seen for a while.

So you're saying that it's up to me to prove why their methodology is incorrect,

That's right.

when they have yet to provide the proof or proofs as to why the altering of methodology is correct.

They don't need to justify their methodology to every ignorant moron who thinks they are qualified because they edit a blog, any more than I need to prove the existence of owls to owl deniers.

But I'm apparently the ignorant one.

It's very apparent, yes.

Wrong, it's not my place to convince you that the science is wrong.

Very well then - I, and the vast majority of the scientific community, and humanity with us, will continue to accept the 150 odd years of climate research behind AGW, and push for mitigation until governments are forced into action. And you can sit quietly, or continue to scream about conspiracies and other delusion rantings like a homeless guy off his meds.

It's up to them to prove that the adjustments are justified with proofs, along with this they're required to give an indepth explanation as to why they believed that such adjustments were necessary, as well as plotting out trends over the period sample.

Nobody cares about your unproven (and obviously unprovable) assertions, anymore than we care about people who have doubts about the relative size of 15 versus 5, or the existence of owls. Your delusions are your problem.

people with guns and flashbang grenades.

One problem is that people will typically read the Wikipedia article first, and allow it to colour their perception. Big mistake if the article is biased to begin with, and a sort of kafkaesque situation for the victim. Wikipedia has known problems in this area, see e.g. Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia by Andrew Leonard; The tale of Mr Hari and Dr Rose – A false and malicious identity is admitted by David Allen Green; the story of Taner Akcam, Any political filth or personal libel can be hurled at the innocent, by Robert Fisk (originally published in The Independent); or that of Philip Mould, Mayfair art dealer Mark Weiss in disgrace after admitting poison pen campaign against rival Philip Mould, by Gordon Rayner.

Right, because the Catholic Church and the friendly states in which it is able to ban abortion, is a much better alternative for the unplanned:

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/0...

I've not read what I'm sure are mounds of news articles about this "scandal" but I suspect that the IRS staff involved decided to audit all partisan groups to make sure they should be 527s instead of 501c3s.

You decide who is on the ballot.

Actually, no. Not for the two sides of the Establishment Party, anyway.

First, in 2011, 196 people provided almost 80% of the funding to all Super PACs. The one with the most funding is also often the winner, though thankfully we have a recent case to show there are outliers.

Second, I read an article last year (or the year before) that tried to work out how many people it actually takes to get someone on the ballot. I wish I could find it now, it was incredibly insightful. (My first born to the man or woman who can find it in my stead.) It talked about the primaries, the selection of convention delegates, how people are chosen to run, etc., some of which is controlled by state laws (like having to register as a party to partake in that party's primary.) I believe the final number was something like a few tens of thousands people decide who gets on the ballot in the major parties, leaving the millions of people who staunchly tow their respective parties to have "only" one option (because, what, vote for third party? You're mad, that's just throwing your vote away!)

The problems in our national politics are far deeper than people voting only with regard to "their" party, though if we could at least get them to acknowledge third parties that would be a major advancement.

"We tried that already with the Occupy movement. It ended up being judo'd into supporting those rat bastard "Tea Party" conservixtremists.

Sorry, but there's simply NO WAY you were not on SOME drug when you typed that!

The "Occupy Movement" was synthetic - it was setup by organizers affiliated with the Democrats who recruited and/or encouraged a bunch of losers to "take to the streets" and "occupy" a few parks - but was NEVER intended to succeed in doing ANYTHING to the Wall St. Bankers who FUNDED Barack Obama. "Occupy Wall Street" was an attempted leftist-populist SMOKESCREEN sponsored in many ways by the Democrats who, you will note, spoke glowingly about the movement and refused to enforce many laws against its actions (for as long as it was useful). It was an attempt to create a counter-balance to the TEA partiers on newscasts through an election cycle (originally, to get Obama through 2012, but now bits are trying to re-ignite for 2014). The "occupiers" were "useful idiots" who undoubtably stood for many OPPOSITE THINGS from the TEA Party, but did not understand that their true masters would never let them be effective; that was NOT the plan. They were NOT "judo'd into supporting" the TEA Party. .. the individual "occupiers" were just used by the politicians and their friends at ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC etc for an election cycle and then were discarded when the tactic failed to convince middle America that the TEA PArty was equally synthetic and obnoxious. Every polluted park, drug overdose, rape, smashed window, etc just further highlighted the complete CONTRAST with the TEA Partiers who did no none of those things.

"The problem is that it is angry average Joe against teams of highly intelligent, highly motivated, professional weasels working for the big two parties"

No. The problem is [1] that the many "angry average Joe" characters you cite are angry about DIFFERENT THINGS and want to go in ENTIRELY different directions for solutions, and [2] that the government is now SO big and involved in EVERYTHING that polititians can easily create a myriad of "wedge issues" to get various "angry average Joes" to support them (beacause of those "wedges") as they harm those Joes with other policies. The "Angry Average Joe" who goes to "occupy" thinks the solution is Marxism (even though that has NEVER worked). The "Angry Average Joe" who joins the TEA Party wants to go back to the small government with limited authority our founders gave us (which DID work). These positions CANNOT be merged; they are POLAR OPPOSITES. This gets gamed by politicians who then argue over things like abortion, gay marriage, global warming, etc as a way to drag people to their sides REGARDLESS of issues of Marxism vs Freedom (and, yes, those two are OPPOSITES... you CANNOT re-distribute wealth without first STEALING it at gunpoint)

Asks the German citizens who were told to register their firearms, but not to worry at all about the government ever showing up to collect them. Then the government showed up to collect them....

Now if only this were true rather than what it is - a lie.

Hitler actually relaxed gun laws, making them much easier to get.

I agree. See Twitter trending hashtag: #KillAllMen Oh, but let's talk about how misogynistic "nerds" are. Give me a fucking break.

What the f*$# is wrong with us? How much longer are we going to be in denial that there's a thing called "rape culture" and we ought to do something about it?

More men are raped than women (see: prison and military) overall. No doubt someone steeped in Demagogue Culture will complain that bringing up that fact is unfair because a man being raped dozens or more times in prison over the course of his sentence isn't the same thing as a college coed being attacked in a dark alley. Which means the latter is worse. Or something.

Demagogue Culture trolls will stop being full of crap when they start talking about female teachers raping male high school students in terms of "rape culture" along with the coed in the ally. Or when you can read a story like this and have "rape culture" mentioned every other sentence.

"The older authority figure wins the trust of the young target by cultivating a false friendship, having heart-to-heart conversations, giving gifts, offering protection. And then the sex ensues, sometimes forced, sometimes seemingly consensual.

It is a classic predatory tactic known as "grooming," and no one familiar with it could have been terribly surprised when a new report from the U.S. Department of Justice declared that young people in the country's juvenile detention facilities are being victimized in just this way. The youngsters in custody are often deeply troubled, lacking parents, looking for allies. And the people in charge of the facilities wield great power over the day-to-day lives of their charges.

What was a genuine shock to many was the finding that in the vast majority of instances, it was female staff members who were targeting and exploiting the male teens in their custody."

I'm sorry, but the gulf between the "legal channels" and "international media" is big enough to fit.. an Earth sized planet in there.

I'm not sorry, because you're defending the indefensible. Snowden was supposed to report to the CIA that the CIA was breaking the law? Tell the Senate Intelligence Committee that the illegal programs the committee has known about and covered up are illegal? Tell the Supremes that their laughable "no standing" rulings and blind trust of official assertions were laughably blind? Where "proper" channels are indisputably used to shut down whisteblowing instead of protecting whisteblowers? What on earth is a state governor supposed to do about illegal wiretapping from the NSA?

"In 2009, Kiriakou took the position of senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under John Kerry. His job was to investigate waste, fraud, abuse and illegality and he turned his attention to the 2001 Dasht-i-Leili massacre, in which an American-backed warlord had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Taliban soldiers when he ordered them to be crammed into metal containers and then loaded onto trucks bound for a prison in Shibarghan, Afghanistan.

Six weeks later, Kiriakou got a phone call from John Kerry asking if he was investigating the CIA.

âoeI said, âYes, I am.â(TM) [He said,] âI want you to stop right now.â(TM) I said âbut weâ(TM)ve got a story here. This is a serious situation.â(TM) âI want you to stop right now,â(TM)â Kerry repeated. âoeSo I stopped.â"

Who do you think you're kidding, here?

It doesn't really matter what authors think.

The public decides what they're going to buy and that, in turn, decides whether the publishers will continue to exist and the authors tied to those publishers will continue to make a living.

And there are authors who will argue that self publishing is the future and is great for writers, despite your insistence that they don't exist.

I see a lot of doctors and nurses bicycle to work where I live, to the nearby hospitals. At least I used to a couple years back. White hipster kids are slowly leaving the area, and there are irreversible transformations at the nearby hospitals, which may have longterm effects on the budget and bottom line of the whole city and region, especially when it comes to tourist-health-care, people visiting for a surgery from far away land because they heard the local hospitals are best at it, or at least used to be, that kind of cash cow may go on for a while longer then just stop, unless they can mobilize a whole new gang of different class of customers, but still of affluence, I'd say mostly from Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, etc, and stay away from a financial implosion. Some people are so fed up with "discrimination" that they will shortsightedly drive entire businesses out of business by trying to fix "discrimination" issues. And then how do you gain from the whole thing? At least you used to get tax revenue to your own area from these "discriminatory" punks that used to work there, once the place goes out of business, then there is nothing. Nothing. You get a whole lot of this: http://media.salon.com/2011/10... and this http://media.cmgdigital.com/sh... and this http://i1109.photobucket.com/a... and this http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... and this http://blog.preservationnation... and this http://www.museumofthecity.org... How many times have you seen it? Let's fix what's wrong with America today, it's discrimination, once we fix that, everything'll be alright. You know I'm saying?

> Let's say if a big bank (i.e. HSBC, or Santander) got caught, certainly hundreds of people would go to jail, right?

. /sarcasm Yes; Oh wait ...

In October 2001, Birkenfeld began working at UBS in Geneva, Switzerland, handling private banking, primarily for clients located in the United States. In 2005, he learned that UBS's secret dealings with American customers violated an agreement the bank had reached with the IRS.

He resigned from UBS in October 2005 and provided written whistleblower complaints to Peter Kurer, Head Counsel for UBS, and other UBS senior executives regarding the illegal practices of U.S. cross-border business.

He is the first person to expose what has become a multi-billion dollar international tax fraud scandal over Swiss private banking Despite his unprecedented, extensive and voluntary cooperation, and registering as an IRS whistleblower, Birkenfeld is the only U.S. citizen to be sentenced to jail as a result of the scandal in March 2012.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Eventually justice is rendered

... As a result of the financial recoveries facilitated by his whistleblowing, Birkenfeld received a $104 million award from the IRS Whistleblower Office in September 2012.

HSBC had to (eventually) pay:

* http://www.salon.com/2012/12/1...

Greed knows no bounds ...

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

The ironic thing is that we were warned exactly about this situation:

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered ... I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies ... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." -- Thomas Jefferson

I'd rather have a free pizza.

Sorry, free pizza is only provided to towns as compensation after a well explodes. http://www.salon.com/2014/02/1...

Heh. But I've run into my fair share of good cops, and I appreciate them all the more with every new report on the bad ones.

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/0...
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/1...

The good ones may be a dying breed. I'd rather not hasten that by mislabeling them.