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That's interesting. I have no idea what the overall statistics are

A very good place to start is by reading SuperFreakonomics which has a chapter on the economics of prostitution. The Village Voice did a series on the myths of human trafficking and "forced prostitution".

but the most disturbing prostitution stories (to me) generally involve pimps

Of course. It has become politically incorrect to blame the prostitutes, and of course they can't blame the johns, because there are too many of them and they vote. So "the pimps" are a convenient target, and we don't let facts get in the way of that. The truth is that crime has fallen dramatically in America. There is overwhelming evidence that this is mostly due to removing lead from gasoline. Yet the number of cops has either stayed the same or gone up. So they need to find a way to justify their existence, as well as their generous pensions. One way to do this is to scare people with stories of violent pimps and human trafficking of sex slaves. Although human sex trafficking is a serious problem in places like Myanmar and Africa, it is close to non-existent in America.

"For years researchers have argued over where and when dogs arose."

Ah yes, the great dog uprising of 02, back in the old country. Let me tell ya, sonny, that was a scary day for anybody with a pocket full of ground beef. The cats didn't come down from the trees for weeks afterwards. Chihuahuas made up a cavalry charge, riding on the backs of Great Danes. All was nearly lost, until the air corps saved us with a mass airdrop of tennis balls.

Truly LOL! Nice synthesis of the TFT Style.

Proving what Phil Austin said in The Firesign Theatre's Big Book of Plays: "The Firesign Theatre is a technique."

But like the voice of Christopher Walken, almost anyone can pull off something that sounds a little like Walken; but no one quite gets it right; sometimes not even The 3 (or 4) or 4 (or 5) Crazy Guys...

the harder we work to avoid it

you are already trackable, you know that right? this new EU law is only about formalizing / standardizing the process. you've already lost. do you really think that you could travel to a foreign country and back and be able to hide it?

Unless a person completely divorces themselves from civilization, they are trackable. And there really isn't much to be done about it.

And it can even be used to vindicate a person:

http://www.thestar.com/news/cr...

http://abc13.com/archive/94415...

http://www.keyetv.com/news/fea...

This one I thought particularly appropriate:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/...

Since surveillance cameras are everywhere, if you are ever falsley accused, start handing out the subpoenas. In short, this guy was accused, arrested, and identified in a lineup as a "serial groper"

But after going through identifiable records from his office, email records, bank transactions, credit cards transaction, and vendors, as well as a more old fashioned alibi in one accusation, charges were dismissed, because it was proven that the perp was not him.

Which is not to say that I like being on camera, or being able to assemble my whereabouts all the time, all that much - but I damn well will use them to my advantage if need be.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Actually, during the period since 1970, the expansion of American science has not stopped altogether. Federal funding of scientific research, in inflation-corrected dollars, doubled during that period, and by no coincidence at all, the number of academic researchers has also doubled. Such a controlled rate of growth (controlled only by the available funding, to be sure) is not, however, consistent with the lifestyle that academic researchers have evolved. The average American professor in a research university turns out about 15 Ph.D students in the course of a career. In a stable, steady-state world of science, only one of those 15 can go on to become another professor in a research university. In a steady-state world, it is mathematically obvious that the professor's only reproductive role is to produce one professor for the next generation. But the American Ph.D is basically training to become a research professor. It didn't take long for American students to catch on to what was happening. The number of the best American students who decided to go to graduate school started to decline around 1970, and it has been declining ever since. ...
    To most of us who are professors, finding gems to polish is not our principal problem. Recently, Leon Lederman, one of the leaders of American science published a pamphlet called Science -- The End of the Frontier. The title is a play on Science -- The Endless Frontier, the title of the 1940's report by Vannevar Bush that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation and helped launch the Golden Age described above. Lederman's point is that American science is being stifled by the failure of the government to put enough money into it. I confess to being the anonymous Caltech professor quoted in one of Lederman's sidebars to the effect that my main responsibility is no longer to do science, but rather it is to feed my graduate students' children. Lederman's appeal was not well received in Congress, where it was pointed out that financial support for science is not an entitlement program, nor in the press, where the Washington Post had fun speculating about hungry children haunting the halls of Caltech. Nevertheless, the problem Lederman wrote about is very real and very painful to those of us who find that our time, attention and energy are now consumed by raising funds rather than teaching and doing research. However, although Lederman would certainly disagree with me, I firmly believe that this problem cannot be solved by more government money. If federal support for basic research were to be doubled (as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves in exactly the same situation again. Lederman has performed a valuable service in promoting public debate of an issue that has worried me for a long time (the remark he quoted is one I made in 1979), but the issue itself is really just a symptom of the larger fact that the era of exponential expansion has come to an end. The End of the Frontier could just as well have been called The Big Crunch."

See also from 10 years ago!
http://www.villagevoice.com/20...

And somewhat more recently:
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...

A collection of general links I put together on schooling:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

Caltech Vice-Provost on pyramid scheme: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...

From 2004, and it has only gotten worse: http://www.villagevoice.com/20...

Still, also problems in science for anyone: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...

More by me from 2009:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

We can and should do better than this as a society.

My proposed solution: a "basic income" (as well as an expanded gift economy and better subsistence via 3D printing and cheap solar panels and cheap agricultural robots). Then anyone can live like a graduate and think and talk and publish all they want on whatever topic they like. Of course, if people want to afford lab space or equipment, that is more of a challenge, and they might have to do paying work. But so much can be done with cheap computers and cheap equipment now, that a lot of good tabletop research can still be done on a shoestring.
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

One example (not saying it will work, but is it tabletop physics/chemistry on the cheap):
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...

Even most millionaires would be better off with a basic income IMHO:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

Now if only the legions of unemployed humanities PhDs (and some unemployed law school graduates too) would just collectively take up this cause for a basic income and expanded gift economy etc. and write stories about it, write persuasive essays about it, write funny viral videos about it, lobby for incremental laws about it (Social Security for All from Birth), and so on. Then we might see some accelerating movement on it... My own attempts in that direction, which I'm sure those legions could vastly improve on:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Nothing short of a big social shift like that is going to solve the fix academia is in, between the student load debt bubble about to burst and the collapsing pyramid scheme of the value of a PhD to train other PhDs. Instead we are seeing play out the ultimate folly of expanding cradle-to-grave schooling as a sort of arms race where parents invest vast amounts of money in hopes their offspring will have secure more credentials than someone else whose parents have less money and so get some coveted job in academia or elsewhere. All the while, AI and robotics are taking on more and more jobs -- even grading student essays and doing it so cheaply that, as in the parable above, humans need not apply.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

LOL, pretty much... except for Bill Koch, who seems to be the "albino" among his black-sheep kinfolk... perhaps not quite as awful as the other two. ;-)

If we can me completely certain that there never will be an error in a capitol crime sentencing, I would advocate immediately dropping the killer in a wood chipper head first. However, being as there is always going to be some error in the legal system the question we should be asking is, "How many innocent people are we willing to murder in the name of revenge/justice?"

Because, until you get to that 100%, and never make an error, that is what you are doing. You are murdering people because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, are the wrong skin color, or cannot afford a good lawyer. At least if you screw up a life in prison sentence, you can let the person out in a decade or two when the truth comes to light.

Right. I could accept capital punishment if 3 conditions were fulfilled:

1. The person would have to in fact be guilty.

2. The person would have to be convicted in a fair trial.

3. Everybody who committed the same crime in the same circumstances would have to be treated the same way.

Obviously those conditions can't be met in the U.S.

Rich people get the top trial lawyers; poor people get public defenders. A millionaire has never been executed in America. There's racial discrimination in arrests, trial and sentencing. White people shoot someone to death and the cops don't even arrest them. Black people shoot someone to death, even in clear self-defense, and they get convicted. http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/07/john_white_conviction_george_zimmerman.php

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/02/riaa_ifpi_consi.php

http://www.turkeymonkey.com/2009/07/19/how-to-get-around-that-pesky-copyrighted-audio-filter-on-youtube-and-facebook/

Onward with the criminalization of American society! First the Attorney General went after "astroturfing": http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/09/new_york_attorn_2.php (does he realize that the vast majority of product reviews on Amazon are fake?); and now he's cracking down on the "sharing" economy to reestablish social and economic order. He should join forces with the Manhattan district attorney, who has been inventing new and interesting ways of criminalizing satire under New York's "fraud" statutes (forgery, identity theft, etc.). See the documentation of two exemplary cases at: http://raphaelgolbtrial.wordpress.com/ and http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/2/3718094/street-artist-nypd-drone-posters-arrested-surveillance

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/182889/
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/04/05/1522215/getting-a-literature-phd-will-make-you-into-a-horrible-person
http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/bioforum/1997-December/025426.html
http://100rsns.blogspot.com/

More than speculation. You can look it up in the American Journal of Public Health. That's pretty much the conclusion of all the researchers in the field.

In New York City around 1985, half the AIDS cases were gay men, and the other half were IV drug users. The public health people were fighting with the Giuliani administration (mayor) and the Pataki administration (governor).

This was nothing new. It was well-known that many infections were spread by IVDUs re-using needles. Hepatitis C probably caused more deaths than AIDS. And yet these idiots kept making it illegal to possess clean needles. They used to say, "The risk of dirty needles will discourage people from using IV drugs." Yeah, think that one out for a second. That was like, "If people could get safe abortions, it would promote immorality."

Pataki claimed he couldn't support clean needles until his health commissioner, Barbara DeBuono, had reviewed the issue. DeBuono said she hadn't gotten around to reading the literature. DeBono finally lost her job when she got caught shoplifting. http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-10-08/news/pataki-s-sick-department-of-health/

"Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty": http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-04-20/news/wanted-really-smart-suckers/1/
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off."

Not that science is much better:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. ... What about personal experience? The women that I know who have the IQ, education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being fired. With their extra income, they invest in child care resources and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while continuing to ascend in their careers. The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility. "

And:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/sep/28/post-doc-research-job-hunt
"After completing my PhD in 2001 I worked as a post-doc researcher in biological sciences in two different labs until 2006. Despite best efforts, the second post-doc didn't work out research wise and after two years of negative results my funding ran out. Even though I applied for other positions, by the time my contract ended I was officially unemployed. To save money I decided to move back in with my parents and claim jobseekers allowance, a galling process when you are 33 and have three higher degrees."

All that to become:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"Who are you going to be? That is the question. In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education an

"But as mesmerizing an expose as the book is, I doubt that this will be more than a speed bump to Scientology's growth and fund raising."

Scientology stopped growing a long time ago. All of their claims about them being "fastest growing religion" are lies, pure and simple.

They reached their peak in the 70's and early 80's. After Hubbard died and Miscavige took over, their membership's been declining steadly ever since. Ask anyone who's been around the orgs in the 70's and 80's. Look up the service completion stats in the Auditor magazine from that time period and compare to recent numbers.

Miscavige is no Hubbard, he doesn't have a cult leader's charisma or reality distortion field. However, he turned out to be very talented as a brutal dictator and a bully. He can put used car salesmen to shame when it comes to high-pressure sales tactics.

So while Miscavige has been unable to inspire people or attract new followers, he has used his talents to beat the staff into submission and extract/extort more and more money from the existing public. But lately with the Super Power scam he's taken it to a new level, and things are so bad that even diehard loyalists are speaking out.

Debbie Cook (longtime Captain of Flag) complains about the relentless money-grubbing and tells the Scientology public to disobey Miscavige's non-Hubbard-policies.

Jan. 2013 - High level public members Luis and Rocio Garcia sue Scientology for fraud

http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-04-20/news/wanted-really-smart-suckers/
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off. Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air. ..."

Or also:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
      1. age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
      2. age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
      3. age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
      4. age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
      5. age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
    This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
    Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias. "

For ways beyond that, see my online book:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

Or this book by Jeff Schmidt:
http://www.disciplinedminds.com/

Here's the real story:
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/09/rep_michael_gri_1.php

Rep. Michael Grimm's Office Break-In Not Quite Watergate; Just an 8th Grader Who Broke a Window
By James King Tue., Sep. 25 2012 at 3:39 PM

Congressman Michael Grimm's Staten Island campaign office was "broken into" over the weekend in what the congressman initially suspected to be a Watergate-esque scandal presumably perpetrated by the cronies of his opponent in this year's election.

Not quite -- it was just an eighth-grader who broke a window.

The NYPD says today that an eighth-grader at a Staten Island junior high school told a school counselor that he and a friend broke the window. The boy, who has not been identified, has been charged with criminal mischief.

  Grimm initially claimed thieves broke in using old keys and then smashed windows to make it appear like it was a just a case of random vandalism -- which it was. He suspected that the burglars installed software on the hard drives of computers in the office designed to delete files.

Nope -- a "police source" tells the New York Daily News that it "appears that a campaign staffer wiped the hard drives accidentally after mistakenly inserting a Linux system disc into a Windows machine."

They have hats for people like Grimm -- they're made of tinfoil.
====================

So, no one "broke in" and it was a staffer who accidentally (?) installed Luinux.

Another linkbait bullshit slashdot "story".

yes, of course that is their point. who cares? why does it matter?

they get to pick recipes and ingredients beforehand, the food is cooked outside of an hour, you know who your competitor is going to be, you know what the secret ingredient is, the meal the judges eat isn't actually the meal that was just prepared, etc., etc.: it's completely fake, the original japanese version was completely fake too

i read this "expose" in the village voice years ago, i had to laugh: there's people out there who actually ever thought this was real? pt barnum was right, there really is a naive clueless sucker born every minute:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-02-19/restaurants/iron-chef-boyardee/

so fucking what?

are you someone who was actually surprised that a hawaiian filipino martial artist is not actually the nephew of chairman kaga? LOL

the point, for YOU:

it's ENTERTAINMENT

get it?

i mean, do you go see "The Avengers" in the movie theatre and stand up and say "Hey! They are using CGI! That guy didn't actually turn into a giant green monster! It's all fake! I can't enjoy it anymore! aaaahhh!"

Any bets on how much hand-wringing about 'big government' 'nanny state' and 'paternalism' there will be now that Bloomberg is targeting large sodas rather than the terrifying marijuana, assassin of youth?

I honestly don't much care for either reefers or Fructose-Extreme Big-Gulp Edition; but I find it endlessly curious how mere time seems to change perception of given public health and public safety crusades. Some city tells smokers to do it outside, or restarauants to cut down on their trans-fats, on pain of some paltry fine and the editorialists are ready to tell you that fascism has finally come to America; but the ones that get hunted down by actual cops and sent to real jail? Apparently not a concern...

Thank you! As soon as I see the words "nanny state" on /. I just brace myself for another round of "let's ignore the inconvenient fact that the government was elected fair and square by the people."

Any bets on how much hand-wringing about 'big government' 'nanny state' and 'paternalism' there will be now that Bloomberg is targeting large sodas rather than the terrifying marijuana, assassin of youth?

I honestly don't much care for either reefers or Fructose-Extreme Big-Gulp Edition; but I find it endlessly curious how mere time seems to change perception of given public health and public safety crusades. Some city tells smokers to do it outside, or restarauants to cut down on their trans-fats, on pain of some paltry fine and the editorialists are ready to tell you that fascism has finally come to America; but the ones that get hunted down by actual cops and sent to real jail? Apparently not a concern...

http://it.slashdot.org/story/08/01/28/1517254/nyc-wants-to-ban-geiger-counters

http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-01-08/news/nypd-seeks-an-air-monitor-crackdown-for-new-yorkers/

P.S. If anyone is following this discussion who is not an asshole, here's an article from the Village Voice about how the Fourth Amendment is routinely violated in New York City. In America, you can get arrested for sitting on your stoop, or stopping to talk to a friend on the sidewalk. (If you're black, anyway.)

http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/1808402/
The NYPD Tapes, Part 2
Bed-Stuy street cops ordered: Turn this place into a ghost town
By Graham Rayman
published: May 11, 2010

Yes, you can leave, but you may be subject to about 10k in fines.

I don't know what media you've been consuming, but the Iraqi government of 2012 is openly hostile to the US government. Didn't you get the memo? It's understandable if your narrative regarding Iraq hasn't been updated since five years ago. You remember 2007? That was when Iraq disappeared from the pages of the mainstream media, what with the decisive defeat of al-Qaeda after the Sunni Awakening and all. It's understandable if your worldview is as outdated as "I kissed a girl and I liked it" by Avril Lavigne...the same year as "An Inconvenient Truth" won the Oscar for Best Documentary, beating out 'Iraq in Fragments' and the absurdly anti-Christian 'Jesus Camp'.

Blimey Daniel Phillips, turns out you're an arsonist too. Have you no moral scruples whatsoever?

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/01/daniel_phillips.php

Think about the crime stats around the world.
Everybody wants low numbers, great success in finding bad guys and the need for ever expanding budgets... how can all that be pulled out of real world crime stats every year that the press get to see?
The US shows the way via : http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-03-07/news/the-nypd-tapes-confirmed/
"Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports."
If your really really good with your yearly stats you get http://jalopnik.com/5889692/the-texas-state-police-now-has-a-crazy-gunboat-fleet @$580,000 per 34-foot speed boat :)

but the publicity around it left what reputation the church had in ruin. No longer are they just an obscure cult most people have barely heard of - after the Anonymous-ran campaign on social media, everyone knows to avoid them, and they even got the criticisms mentioned on TV news.

Huh? Scientology has been "exposed" many times. Whatever "anonymous" did was barely noticed.

"When you see a car crash, you know you're the only one who can help. When you see teenagers being imprisoned and used for slave labor on a ship you're partying on with an X Factor contestant, you think, meh."

Fuck that. It's scorched earth policy now.

Right, before that you've all been supping high tea with your pinkie fingers outstretched, eh?

Just ask the unemployed that span the political spectrum.

Well, except for the ones protesting in Wall St., of course.

While tasteless, in the end this company has always been activist and worked hard to raise money and awareness of important causes. Michael Musto says cut him a break and I think he's right: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/dailymusto/2011/02/kenneth_cole_ca.php

OT: but I wonder how much time gets wasted every day by people who don't link their... uh... links. I mean, I know it only takes a few clicks to copy+paste+go in the address bar of a new tab, but a few seconds extra times however many people do that every day... it's gotta be something. Not trying to rude or anything, just genuinely curious.

Oh, and http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-07-26/art/brave-new-hamburger/

It's nice to see a bit of karmic justice after Gawker falsely accused EasyDNS of cutting off Wikileaks (it was EveryDNS), then acted like jackasses when called on it.

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2010/12/gawker_refuses.php

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/right-to-remain-silent

Act 2 starts at the 17 minute mark.

It's based on this story from the Village Voice. Apparently this is not uncommon.

you mean like stop-and-frisks? and arresting without charges to sort things out later? cops wouldn't needlessly harass people. never in a million years. but they do have jobs to do and numbers to meet and their bosses won't suffer a poor attitude.

Just don't let the Nitrous Mafia find out. They'll want a cut of the action.

(Of course, since it's concrete the MAFIA Mafia might have something to say about that...)

.

What BP is still a company?????

First we need to fine the board of directors sooo much money that they'll have to go to China sell some kidneys on the black market to pay up.

Then we need to lock them up in jail in Yemen for criminal negligence. I mean we do have the memo proving it : http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2010/05/leaked_bp_memo.php

But first try watching Primer, just to know what you shouldn't do...

It's one of the best movies I've ever seen, but watch it 2/3 times before judging -- as suggested by the director himself -- or use some reference timeline when in doubt (spoilers ahead).

Maybe your policemen are under pressure from higher ups like these guys were?

You don't seem to understand this newfangled "burden of proof" concept.

It would've mattered in court. In our argument it is not as important, because it is not, what my point hinges on. The one-hour minimum overtime was just an example of a possible absurd rule.

If you actually support the claim, sure, then it stops being BS.

Are you, actually, denying, that the gross abuses in the Union-contracts exist? More like are simply trying to bog me down with this meaningless nit-picking... Here are some overtime-related examples for you:

• Up until this year, employees of Wall Street Journal had a 5-hour minimum overtime pay. That's gone now, but only in exchange for other concessions.
• If the employee works more than one-half of an extra consecutive shift, the time worked for the entire extra shift shall be paid at time and one-half of pay. Yep, round it up — AFL-CIO are proud of this one, they quote it, even if without the full text.
• Firefighters received overtime pay regardless of whether they worked more than scheduled because their union contract guarantees regularly scheduled overtime (emphasis mine).
• The union contract for Muni operators prevents the SFMTA from hiring part-time drivers, meaning overtime must be paid overtime

The last two, in particular, blow up your entire argument about employees "not caring" for employees, and "forcing" to work overtime... The examples show, how the unions consider the overtime rules as a "benefit".

Of course, you know, my example was valid. BS here is produced by you — at least, the bulls produce it through proper orifices...

Forgive me if you've heard this put better, but...

From I will not read your fucking script:

There's a great story about Pablo Picasso. Some guy told Picasso he'd pay him to draw a picture on a napkin. Picasso whipped out a pen and banged out a sketch, handed it to the guy, and said, "One million dollars, please."
"A million dollars?" the guy exclaimed. "That only took you thirty seconds!"
"Yes," said Picasso. "But it took me fifty years to learn how to draw that in thirty seconds."

In fact, didn't we all criticize Bush for doing this? He'd sign a law into effect but just before signing it, he'd write a note saying that he won't enforce it. (So called "Signing Statements.") In fact, here's a Village Voice article criticizing him for this practice: http://www.villagevoice.com/2006-08-08/news/bush-s-invisible-ink/

I'm not saying I completely approve of Obama's DOJ supporting the RIAA, but I don't think the situation is as black-and-white as some people make it out to be.

Related Links About Academia:
        http://novia.net/~pschleck/academia/
Sample link:
        "Generation Debt; Wanted: Really Smart Suckers: Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty"
        http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0417,kamenetz,53011,1.html
        "Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off. Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air. ..."

Sounds like it is getting worse. Here is part of why:
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
    http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
   

STD's are actually fairly uncommon in the mainstream porn industry. Some performers wear condoms

Genital herpes is endemic and ubiquitous in the mainstream porn industry.

You have a pretty skewed view of the whole situation. For example, Prescott Bush founded the family fortune on working for a company which funneled funds to the S.S. to do Hitler's bidding. And since we're talking about IBM, this is an excellent time to mention that IBM of Germany built and delivered the machines to manage the concentration camps, and actually printed the punch cards as well, but does their level best to deny their part in history. Nonetheless, many racial groups have reason to recall. No, I don't have any Obama hating to do today, don't worry... But to have the head of a dynasty founded by a known Nazi collaborator head the CIA, then become president, then get his son into the office... Well, it should put this whole conversation into perspective.

Hot diggity DAMN I love the internet. It makes it so easy to cite your sources. If articles like these start dropping off these here internets, you'll know to run and not look back.

in the grand scheme of things, personal infidelity is probably not the biggest "crime" a public official can commit.

Like Eliot Spitzer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer After Spitzer was forced out, he was replaced by David Patterson, a nice guy, whose main virtue was his ability to get along with the Republicans, who promptly paid him back by throwing the New York State legislature into chaos http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/11/ny Tom Robbins said in the Village Voice that the exercise was paid for by billionaire Tom Golisano after Spitzer wouldn't agree to cut state taxes for billionaires. http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-07-01/columns/senate-coup-plotters-hidden-agenda/

Spitzer's name was exposed during a supposedly confidential investigation by Republican federal prosecutors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Siegelman As it turned out, they didn't have evidence of a crime to charge him with.

The supposed victim of this affair, Spitzer's wife, didn't want him to resign. Why should she? What good does it do her to have her husband lose his job?

I'd choose a president who respects civil liberties & human rights and acts in the interest of the public, but happens to be a philander, over a president who is completely devoted to his wife, but is willing to step on civil liberties, support torture, or sell out the American public to corporate interests.

Well the way the Republicans get away with destroying civil liberties, supporting torture, and selling the American public out to corporate interests is by distracting voters with sex scandals.

What amazes me is that supposedly intelligent people, like New York Times columnists, let the Republicans put this over on them twice (with Clinton and again with Spitzer). It's hard to believe that they're so stupid. I wonder if there's another reason.

Spitzer was a victim, BTW, of the indiscriminate financial reporting laws which give the attorney generals indiscriminate power to go after anyone they want, including the other party. The only consolation is that Spitzer played this game himself, so there is a defense of of being hoisted on his own petard.

cross the CoS, you get reamed. amongst their successful takedown targets: the IRS. yes, the IRS. read all about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_snow_white

see the part where they break into IRS offices? i wonder how many times this section has been deleted by CoS griefers

this is a good article:

http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/487758

if these assholes have no bringing the god damn IRS to heal, what the hell do you think they are going to do about wikipedia? we all should worry, these CoS trolls are committed, and the splash damage could seriously bring wikipedia's integrity into question if the CoS wins any sort of battle with wikipedia

Even after Hubbard's death in 1986, the IRS continued to deny the organization tax-exempt status, and Scientology fought back by siccing personal investigators on individual IRS employees and filing more than 2,000 separate lawsuits against the agency.

Despite the harassment, however, the IRS continued to win victories against Scientology in court. In 1992, A United States Claims Court upheld the IRS denial, citing "the commercial character of much of Scientology" and its "scripturally based hostility to taxation." Tax exempt organizations, the claims court wrote, "simply do not exhibit the financial complexity or the phenomenal preoccupation with money displayed by Scientology's management churches and organizers."

By then, however, the IRS had already, secretly, caved. In 1991, under the first George Bush presidency, the IRS had reversed itself and began a process that wasn't made public until 1993, under the Clinton administration, when the IRS revealed that it was giving nearly every Scientology entity the tax exempt status it coveted.

It was a stunning turnaround and one that, [more than] a decade later, still has tax experts shaking their heads.

Former IRS exempt organizations specialist and tax journalist Paul Streckfus says that the IRS simply cracked from the pressure Scientology had been applying for so many years.

"The IRS found that Scientology was more than they could handle," Streckfus says. "We think of the IRS as so powerful, but by 1991, the commissioner of the time, Fred Goldberg, decided that the case was tying up the IRS. Scientology seemed to have limitless money, so I think Goldberg decided he wanted to get rid of the case and to hell with it. He directed his people to get the best deal that they could."

Miscavige, announcing the victory to his flock at a gathering in Los Angeles, bragged that in 1991 he had simply dropped by the IRS headquarters and, without an appointment, asked to speak to Goldberg. (After this was first reported, Scientology took out a full-page ad in the New York Times denying that Miscavige had said it.) Soon after the impromptu meeting, Goldberg established a special committee to examine the Scientology cases--a move that tax experts say all but assured that the exemptions would eventually be awarded. In court testimony, IRS officials have admitted that during the process of granting the exemptions, they were instructed not to look into Scientology's business-like ventures. The final agreement called for Scientology to pay $12.5 million.

"To them, it was a pittance," Streckfus says.

Goldberg has refused to discuss the matter since he left the IRS. A New York Times analysis of the affair estimated that Scientology saved tens of millions of dollars in taxes.

"The war is OVER!" Miscavige said in his Los Angeles speech, and at one point referred to a "billion dollar tax bill" that Scientology would not have to pay.

"It's a sad commentary," says Streckfus about the IRS cave-in. "You or I would have been sent up the river. But if you have enough resources, you can beat off the IRS."

The IRS no longer describes Scientology as a money-making dictatorship headed by one man, but a religion which contains many separate, legally distinct entities, each with its own board of directors and corporate officers.

I'm disappointed, I wanted cartoons! If anybody else was disappointed at the lack of cartoons in that link, enjoy:

A Farewell salute
The raw, gritty, and absolutely true story of a computer operating system's mascot who overcame unimaginable hardship and went on to become an unparallelled success (maybe he went back to that job he had in that cartoon that no one reads)
You can't trust science
Sparky buys a house (Tomorrow is prescient)
Alan Greenspan (Yikes! Tom Tomorrow has balls of crystal!)
A handy guide to the (2007) housing market

And since this is a nerd site: Barack Obama and the Invasion of Time (not a Tomorrow doodle)

I'm disappointed, I wanted cartoons! If anybody else was disappointed at the lack of cartoons in that link, enjoy:

A Farewell salute
The raw, gritty, and absolutely true story of a computer operating system's mascot who overcame unimaginable hardship and went on to become an unparallelled success (maybe he went back to that job he had in that cartoon that no one reads)
You can't trust science
Sparky buys a house (Tomorrow is prescient)
Alan Greenspan (Yikes! Tom Tomorrow has balls of crystal!)
A handy guide to the (2007) housing market

And since this is a nerd site: Barack Obama and the Invasion of Time (not a Tomorrow doodle)

Could this ultimately help Germany develop historical blind spots?

Unlikely as long as most people keep believing everything they see in Hollywood movies and the tired old holocaust film formula keeps winning awards.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-12-31/film/from-reverence-to-rape-in-defiance-and-good

One of my history teachers in high school recommended Enemy at the Gates as a great historical view of the Battle of Stalingrad and the Eastern Front of WWII in general. The entire plot of that film is fictional and the battle scenes are laughably inaccurate (run into battle unarmed or be shot comrades!). Otherwise the guy was intelligent but lacking any proper information he chose to believe what he saw in the movies.

Uhh, no. He was reaching down to pick up a grenade that fell off his jacket, not knowing it was live.

Well, if you want to get technical about it -- the grenade did not come from his jacket -- it came from the guy next to him, and Cleland had a month left in his tour. The M-26 had a design flaw, in that it came with straight pins, which made them very easy to dislodge. Experienced soldiers knew to either bend the pins or tape them, but the other guy didn't know that and was walking around with a vest full of the dangerous straight pins.

So I didn't remember all the details but the important part is that Max Cleland went to Vietnam, a place full of dangerous things like Viet Cong shooting at you and live grenades that were badly designed. His Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, avoided Vietnam on 5 student deferments (University of Georgia 1966; University of Tennessee College of Law 1968) and a medical deferment for "bad knees" caused by football in college.

Democratic Max Cleland, on the other hand, was awarded the Silver Star "for gallantry in action" at the battle of Khe Sanh, one of the Vietnam war's fiercest firefights.

indeed, if someone were liberal with their info on facebook, and they pissed off scientology, they would be making it very easy for scientologists to unleash their fascist "fair game" bullshit

so, let me answer your question this way:

any scientologists reading this post, please put me on your enemies list. i will make it every effort of every fibre in my being to defeat you. please find my personal details, please use them against me. i will respond in kind you slimy motherfuckers

why do i say this?

because they are already my enemy. they are already your enemy, you reading this. scientology is the enemy of anyone who values privacy and freedom. fight them now, when they are a large cockroach, or your grandchildren will be fighting them when they are a swarm of locusts. there is no such thing, as someone who values privacy, freedom, liberty, to not be fighting scientology, already

you are defined in this world by your enemies. i relish being the enemy of scientology. i welcome their attention. evil fucking scum. life is too damn short to hide. i would rather die poor and proud knowing i actually fought and stood for something in this short brutal life than die rich and a miserable coward, hating myself for giving into evil. because that is what scientology is: its pretty much the definition of evil if you value liberty freedom and privacy

scientology is the enemy of every moral principle i hold dear. they freely disregard people's liberty and basic freedoms in pursuit of growing their fungus of a money consuming ponzi scheme that calls itself a "religion". do not even begin to compare this virus with any established world religion. by orders of magnitude, in your most fantastic description of the operating procedures of traditional religions, none of them consume lives and doggedly destroy the freedoms of its victims and of its enemies as nastily as scientology does

any nation that respects basic human rights and freedoms will do their utmost to outlaw and shut down this fungal growth called scientology. hurray germany! come to your sense, rest of the western world. this institution is the antithesis of every principle western enlightenment is founded upon. it is your enemy, whether you know it or not

a society that says it stands for tolerance but tolerates intolerant institutions is hollow and has invited their doom. in the name of tolerance, you fight intolerant institutions. scientology, by their repeated and disgusting tactics, has made it immensely clear they have absolutely zero respect for your rights and freedoms and your privacy. it is therefore in the name of tolerance i fight scientology. squash the fucking bug while it is still small, drive it from the face of the earth. scientology must cease to exist in the name of everything i stand for

and i invite everyone here on slashdot reading my words to stand with me, if you stand for ANYTHING in this world

does that answer your question clearly enough?

besides, you are talking about an organization that infiltrated and bought to heel the goddamn irs! any virulent, persistent fungal creature that can make the goddamn irs cry mercy is NOT an enemy that will be put off by your pathetic attempts in keeping your personal life safe by avoiding facebook! this forum, slashdot, this forum that so much of us look for on news in the good fight had to bend to the will of these locusts. you honestly think this is a fight you can avoid in your life? you honestly think this is an enemy any of us can allow to continue? you honestly believe you are not already their enemy in principle if you value privacy, freedom liberty?

if you are a recognized enemy of scientology, god save you. nothing will protect your privacy. in which case, the

Wilf Blitzer, and even moreso his sidekick Jack Cafferty, are on the left.

That Wolf Blitzer. And he's an anchor, not a commentator. I'll give you Jack Cafferty as a liberal commentator, but Wolf Blitzer is not a commentator so he doesn't count in the list of "liberal commentators".

So that would make one

Lou Dobbs is a populist who straddles both sides of the fence

If he's a populist, then he must not be an evil liberal.

Campbell Brown seems to play it down the middle; I haven't detected a significant bias in her reporting over the years.

So then you admit she is neither a commentator nor an evil, evil liberal.

Larry King doesn't count

Larry King is also a reporter, still not a commentator. For that matter have you looked at his interview list? He's had numerous interviews in the past year that would never go to evil, evil, evil liberals.

Anderson Cooper is on the left.

Repeat after me:
Anderson Cooper is not a commentator. You can call him one, but that does not make him one. Anderson Cooper is a reporter. You were ranting about evil, evil, evil, evil liberal commentators. Cooper is not a commentator and therefore does not belong on your list.

there's Gupta, who is not a conservative, even if he agrees with conservatives on some issues

I have seen him agree with conservatives more than liberals. And being as he is called in for commentary on health-related issues, he needs to be examined in the light of the commentary he gives on the same. Which is conservative far more often than not. Remember when he came out with a bag of half-truths in response to Sicko?

Tom Foreman, who seems to me to be on the left, but I don't watch him enough to know

Tom Foreman is an anchor. Still not a commentator.

There's Roland Martin, definitely on the left

I'm not familiar with him, but I see in his background that he is a Christian reporter from Texas. I'll leave that one as a wash.

Fareed Zakaria, definitely on the left.

He is a commentator, though he is regarded as a centrist.

So really, you came up with one actual liberal commentator on CNN that we could verify. And how recently was he hired? And we're talking about someone who doesn't even have his own show outright.

In contrast, CNN made a huge deal out of hiring Glenn Beck. He has his own show every night. He often gets short spots in the morning news on both CNN and headline news to give conservative spin to the morning news while sitting in his studio to remind us he also does conservative radio.

So you falsely attack my "methods" out of the blue, and then say you aren't interested in them.

Did you read the title of the thread? It says Not sure I would want his methods. I never attacked said methods. You spun my statement into an attack on your methods. I was criticizing your extremely partisan journal entries.