Truth serum does not fucking work, period, at all. This has been known for many decades now. If it worked, we would've been using it against Bad Guys in Secret Prisons, and we're not. We're not because it doesn't fucking work and everyone knows that.
Except apparently the people in this court room.
Actually, there is one compound that might be considered effective as a "truth serum", and that's scopolamine. Read up on the way it has been used by criminals, for instance this link:
I have personal experience with this drug, having been involuntarily dosed with it once, and it's effects were scary indeed, in a way no other substance has ever come close to matching. Essentially it wipes out your short-term memory completely, and I do mean completely. You start to say something but by the end of the sentence you literally can't remember what it was you were trying to say. You have no idea where you are or how you got there, and you tend to believe whatever you're told if there's someone there to "helpfully" fill in the blanks. People empty their bank account to strangers, give up passwords and PIN numbers, it's crazy. The thing is, it's only short-term memory that's affected, everything else is still there. So I don't see any reason why you couldn't be questioned about past criminal behavior as easily as your financial secrets. Having experienced this stuff first hand, I have no doubt it could be used as a truth drug, given the right setting and an experienced interrogator. That said, I'm absolutely against the whole idea and believe this is a treacherous road for the legal system to be going down. Voluntarily or otherwise, chemical interrogation has no place in American courtrooms.
I recently got a ticket for running a red light, not from a camera but a real cop. It had snowed the night before and the roads were still quite slippery. The light went yellow literally right at the tripping point, the moment where it could go either way and you have to make a split-second decision. I honestly felt that given the slick conditions there might be problems if I tried to stop, so I kept going - after all, I felt sure there was plenty of time to make it through. I did not speed up, I was absolutely not trying to run the light, I was just trying to do the right thing. Of course, the light went red so fast I couldn’t believe it, when I was almost but not quite directly underneath. The damn cop was right there and immediately pulled me over, it was all so suspiciously convenient, but what can you do? I explained to the cop I wasn’t trying to run the light, I wasn’t even in a hurry, I honestly felt it was safer to keep going and thought I had time to do so. His response was to inform me that the lights are timed to give drivers plenty of room to stop before they go red, and if I couldn’t stop safely then I must have been speeding. He actually started to write out another ticket for speeding! Or perhaps he just pretended to, I don’t know. Either way, it was obvious I would get no sympathy at all from him, so I just said “Yes sir, officer, whatever you say“ and meekly accepted the single $120 ticket he eventually gave me. I sent it in Not Guilty, which was probably overly optimistic and will cost me a day at court, but what the hell, I was honestly just trying to do the right thing, we'll see what happens with the prosecutor.
But it's the point about the light being calibrated to the speed limit that interests me. Is this a common practice, or a legally mandated thing? If so, what exactly is the perfect amount of yellow time for a stoplight on a 25 mph city street? Is there a table or formula somewhere that will give me this information? Is there even a universally accepted way to derive that time, or do different States have different ideas about what constitutes a safe stopping time? If there are in fact known safety durations, then I would imagine any light with a yellow time below that safety threshold should be challengeable in court. I would also bet that a lot of these for-profit camera operations are either setting the lights right at, or even below those safety thresholds. Does anyone know what the accepted standards really are in these situations? That info just might be of help to me when I go to court.
I've listened to long harangues from musicians about how unjust the music industry is, and it turns out all they need is $2,500 to put out an album that's already been written AND recorded. I just can't understand it -- if it's that important to you, if this is what you really want to do with your life, why wouldn't you just put $2,500 on your credit card and damn the consequences?
Boy, that's some assumption you're making there. Are you really so out of touch that you just assume every musician must have a credit card, let alone one with $2500 or more credit left on it? I wish you the best with your writing career, but you need to familiarize (or perhaps re-familiarize) yourself with the term "starving artist". It doesn't matter that you were once broke yourself, the fact remains that for a whole lot of musicians, especially those just starting out in the biz, or who come from low-income neighborhoods, yes, that kind of money is indeed going to be totally out of the question. If they do happen to have a credit card, it's already maxed out, believe me. Following your dreams is just not all that easy in modern-day America, not if you're one of the 99%.
While we're on the topic of warrantless wiretaps, there's something I've been trying to figure out.
Bush starts the warrantless wiretap thing, the reaction from the left is to fume with anger at the horrible abuse of power.
Obama continues it and adds in the whole "assassinate Americans using robotic aircraft" twist, and reaction from the same people is "I support the President on this, though I have mild reservations on a few aspects".
My question is... what the heck is up with that?
Well, there's the fact that when Bush did it it was clearly and unambiguously against the law. I freely admit that part bothered me no end. Of course, once the warrantless wiretapping became public knowledge Congress quickly passed a retroactive bill that supposedly legitimized the practice and made everything all hunky dory. Now, that law still doesn't make warrantless wiretapping right or even constitutional in my book, and I'm no big fan of a lot of what the Obama administration has done, to say nothing about my mixed feelings about the man himself... But, this does help explain why the issue was a much bigger deal to many people when Bush got caught doing it. It's the difference between a politician you hate who nonetheless gets fairly elected, and that same hated politician rigging an election in order to win. Nobody likes it when the first happens, but the latter tends to really piss people off.
If the hostage situation guaranteed that Carter couldn't be reelected, why didn't the Iraq war guarantee that Bush couldn't be reelected? The Iraq war was a much larger fuck-up by orders of magniuted. The public doesn't care if you fuck up. They care whether or not you swagger when you fuck up.
What makes you think Bush was legitimately reelected??
If someone would just point out to these people that even cheap hobbyist drones can be easily armed... With guns! You'd think the average Texan would be all for them, in that case. In fact, maybe we should get the NRA involved, I'm sure they could stop this bill in its tracks.
I think most people here are missing an interesting angle. Granted, the headline and summary are misleading, and the quoted article does seem to make way too much out of what was actually said by the prosecution, so not surprising that the discussion so far has focused mainly on those issues. But to my mind the most interesting thing in the original HuffPo article is the last paragraph. Check it out:
Some congressional staffers left the briefing with the impression that prosecutors believed they needed to convict Swartz of a felony that would put him in jail for a short sentence in order to justify bringing the charges in the first place, according to two aides with knowledge of the briefing.
I don't know, this seems like a rather damning admission by the prosecution if true, because it shows they knew damn well they were on shaky ground, and that they were playing to public perception rather than truly seeking justice. It is also IMO much more likely to be true than the "prosecuted for his political beliefs" angle, which seems debatable at best.
every product is as valuable as the energy used to craft it
So what about the value of artwork, then? Have they finally quantified and measured creative energy? Are they able to determine the precise amount of beauty that resides in the eye of a given beholder? No, I didn't read the paper, but the whole thing sounds a bit too simplistic. True value is what people are willing to pay, nothing more, and nothing less.
I don't know why parent has been marked Funny - it should be marked insightful. Check this http://kanewj.com/wbc/
Insightful? Hardly. The author of that article you linked to is a moron. Westboro has a revenue stream from suing municipalities, which is their real raison d'etre? Right. Since most municipalities are legally immune from this type of lawsuit, it'd be nice to see some proof that such revenue-generating lawsuits actually exist, wouldn't it? Here's what the article actually offers instead: "I will tell you where I got this truth about Phelps. I looked him in the eye" Wow, that's convincing. It must be true! Um, no, sorry, but real truth is that Phelps & Co are as batshit crazy as they seem to be.
Question: If the designer was so intelligent, why did he/she/it equip certain cave organisms that live in total darkness with vestigial eyes that can't possibly be of any benefit to said organisms?
Extra credit: Why are those eyes nonfunctional, even if the organism is moved to a lighted environment?
This has the potential to be a genuinely big deal if the results hold up. Despite the article’s somewhat misleading title, the paper’s authors are not suggesting that we should just throw away the mouse model. They are saying that in one limited area, the treatment of sepsis (burns and trauma are also mentioned, but the emphasis is on sepsis) the mouse may not be the best organism to use as a model. According to their research, mice respond to sepsis in an entirely different manner than humans, with different genes and genetic pathways being activated. They back up this claim with very solid data, according to the independent researchers contacted by the Times. Moreover, as the article points out, there are good longstanding reasons to suspect the mouse model may be flawed in this area. Using the mouse model, which has become an essentially mandatory step under current drug R&D methodologies, no effective sepsis drug has ever been found that also works in humans. A different genetic response to sepsis would not only explain the drug development failure, but would make logical sense given the mouse’s constant exposure to high levels of bacteria and its garbage-ingesting lifestyle. The fact that it takes a million times as much bacteria to kill a mouse as a human suggests strongly that something fundamentally different is going on with the two species.
We don’t of course know the real reasons why the paper was initially rejected by both Science and Nature, but the authors seem to be saying it was primarily a matter of disbelief: the mouse model is so strongly accepted and ingrained that the reviewers simply couldn’t accept that there might be a problem with it, and the fault must therefore lie with the paper. This is not at all an uncommon reaction when a longstanding scientific belief or paradigm is first challenged. The paper‘s authors seem pretty sure of themselves, and the outside experts interviewed in the article seem to be impressed with the general quality of the research. The authors are putting forward a well thought out and logical theory backed with solid data. I don’t believe we can dismiss the results as easily as some here are suggesting. It’s not my field, but this looks and smells like the real deal to me.
Yes that was the Bush policy, except you couldn't see a lawyer and you would never actually get a trial (maybe a military tribunal aka kangaroo court)
Not to mention the fact that even if you were found innocent, you wouldn't necessarily be released from Gitmo! I remember my disbelief at hearing senior Bush administration lawyers testify under oath that this was so: innocent verdicts would not mean the prisoner would be released. I knew then that the USA I grew up in and believed to be the best place in the world had long since begun to go bad. It's difficult to get all exercised over Obama's current failings, real though they be, the man is merely presiding over the festering corpse of a once great nation. The manner in which it rots seems relatively unimportant.
I have been listening to the same 20 songs for 5 years.
Congratulations, you appear to be perfectly qualified to work as program director for any contemporary commercial music-playing radio station. Now if you can just get that down to 15 or even 10 songs, your future with Clear Channel seems assured.
If it applies to innocents as well as the guilty, taking a deal is completely irrelevant and unrelated to actual guiltiness. Thus, you can't use the number of deals as measure to estimate that a majority is guilty.
If you take a deal, you are admitting you are guilty (of a lesser offence) and thus you are not innocent. Therefore, 100% of people taking deals are guilty, by definition.
If you're innocent, you don't plead guilty. No one is going to believe otherwise, unless you can prove you were actually tortured, or something.
You can't seriously believe this! Or is your post some kind of sarcasm? I listened for the whoosh, but... I have to assume you mean what you say. Clearly you have absolutely no conception of how the US justice system actually works in practice. The truth is that enormous numbers of people who absolutely firmly believe they are completely and factually innocent still plead guilty to a variety of crimes in US courtrooms every day. Frequently they do so on the direct advice of their lawyer. That's how it is, that's the problem, plea bargains are the norm and there is incredible pressure on a defendant not to take it to trial. Given the choice between the possibility of a lengthy prison sentences combined with likely ruinous legal fees, and an offer of a brief or suspended jail sentence and a small fine, it's not difficult at all to see how and why innocent people regularly plead guilty. No, they aren't tortured, but yes, there is an "or something" and I have just described it, it is the very real threat of ruination and long incarceration. The stakes are simply too high, most people fold and take the deal offered. As to the percentage who are actually innocent, no one knows, not you or me or the so-called experts. The system is simply so distorted by now that it is impossible to know the true number of innocent people fed into our meat grinder of a justice system. All you can do is pray it never happens to you.
Baloney. Corporations are made up of and owned by people. Every cent that a corporation retains in profits is returned to people in some manner, be it dividends, capital gains, business investment (spending) etc.
Flatly and obviously wrong on the face of it, unless you somehow think that obscenely bloated executive salaries and bonuses have no effect on a company's profits. But they do, and it's not even much of a mystery why the shareholders put up with it - you can Google any number of articles that attempt to explain why it's so hard for shareholders to rein in excessive executive compensation under the current system. Any way you look at it, it's absurd to claim that corporate money is always returned to "the people" when the last 20 years have proven just the opposite, with more and more corporate money being sucked up by less and less of the privileged few at the very top of the ladder. If contemporary US capitalism worked the way you seem to think it does, we probably wouldn't be in the financial mess we're currently in, but unfortunately it doesn't.
Oh and they can give "false positives" (not really false) if you eat too many poppy seeds from normal rather than opium poppies.
Off-topic, I know, but that isn't quite right, the reason for the potential false positives is that the seeds do indeed come from genuine opium poppies, there is no such thing as edible seed from "normal" poppies. Poppy seeds found in food products all derive from Papaver Somniferum AKA the opium poppy, and yes it has been proven that eating as little as a single poppyseed bagel can result in a positive test. The seeds contain very small amounts of opium, not enough to produce pharmacological effects, which is why you can eat them, but modern urinalysis is sensitive enough to pick up even trace amounts. Bottom line is you should never eat anything containing poppy seeds in the week before a piss test.
If you actually read the article, you would see that he is claiming zero knowledge of any illegal use of his software in NY State or anywhere else. All of his sales were to clients not based in the USA, and furthermore he claims that he carefully checked to insure all his clients were legitimately operating in areas where such gambling is perfectly legal. Supposedly the software is not even usually sold directly to the entities taking bets, it's more of a middleman situation where clients running his software would in turn provide services to actual bookmaking/gambling operations - and that may be how he got into trouble, because he would have no way of knowing if his clients were in turn offering services to illegal operations. Of course, it's possible he knew all along who the final users were going to be, and if the prosecution can prove this he will likely be found guilty and rightfully so, but it doesn't sound like they are trying to make that case. If you believe this guy is telling the truth, it really does seem like a case where he is being held accountable for what other people did with his code without his knowledge. The interesting angle is that he was only charged after he refused to install secret backdoor code at the behest of the FBI, who wanted him to secretly record the names and addresses of all the gamblers ultimately placing bets processed with his software. If true, that is rather chilling indeed. Given that virtually all software can be used to facilitate criminal acts of one kind or another, who knows how many software writers have caved in to similar demands and already installed precisely this kind of secret backdoor code?
The fact that meat consumption is so high is a much bigger problem than most people are willing to admit. Meat production is helping to starve people.
Actually, the latest research appears to give red meat a somewhat cleaner bill of health than you might expect: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=meat-of-the-matter-modern-methods-preserving-cooking-meat-healthy It turns out that it's just processed meats that are bad for you, not meat itself. I've always wondered how such a "natural" part of the human diet could be so unhealthy, and now we know: it probably isn't, not in and of itself. It's the preservatives and all the other crap added to processed meat that's the real problem.
Wouldn't going over the cliff solve that problem for the Republicans? The tax increases happen without them voting for them. Then they can start voting for tax decreases with a clear conscience.
Yes, exactly! And it is precisely this that scares the Republicans more than anything, that after the cliff the Democrats will start introducing tax breaks for the poor and middle class, which of course is legislation the GOP can hardly oppose, and so... Voila! Taxes on the rich have effectively been raised! Although in point of fact they likely won't even have been restored to Clinton-era levels, but I digress. Going off the cliff is a win for the Dems, unless the mere fact of it happening sends the Market into a tailspin, but Wall Street probably has just enough intelligent and level-headed traders to limit any disruption to a temporary blip. Really, I see going over the Dreaded Fiscal Cliff as something that might actually be good for the country, with very little downside. You heard it here first!
Moderators, please mod him up as informative. Here is the take away paragraph.
Early data suggests that a period of approximately two years of intermittent treatments may be required to attain the goal of long-term abstinence from narcotics and stimulants for many patients. The majority of patients treated with Ibogaine remain free from chemical dependence for a period of three to six months after a single dose...
Sorry, I do have points, but... No can do, on the upmod. If you spend some time on any of the sites that are genuinely run by and for addicts and ex-addicts, you will find many, many personal stories posted by sometimes desperate addicts who have actually tried ibogaine therapy. The basic message seems to be, no, it does not work, with actual results that are a far cry from the way the drug has sometimes been portrayed in the media and in the few very limited and suspect studies done to date. Ibogaine is in the same category as so-called "ultra-rapid detox" type treatments, which is to say that while it does have its true believers, the vast majority of those who actually undergo the treatment don't see anything remotely like the promised results. Most discover this to their chagrin only after spending huge amounts of money. The sad truth is, there is currently no overnight and/or one-time procedure that will cure addiction. Of course there isn't, it's an extremely complex and still imperfectly understood condition with causes deeply-rooted in both personality and brain chemistry. So like the mythical free lunch, there simply is no such thing as a miracle cure for addiction, and I don't see much hope there ever will be.
And where does the power from heating the air come from?
Congress! Where else?
Studies have shown that multiple tornadoes worth of hot air can at times be generated by even a single congressperson, it's just a matter of finding the right one. Yeah, I lost the link to those studies, but hey, you know it's true.
The difference is that with private insurance you can switch companies and try for a better policy and better service. It is also far more likely to be efficiently run, and therefore not go out of business or suddenly cut benefits like government run programs will have to do when the money runs out. With the government you've got exactly zero choices and if you don't like what they did what are you going to do? Sue them? Good luck with that.
Zero choices, eh? OK, you want to talk about choices?? First of all, in the US most health insurance is provided by one's employer, so there is effectively very little or no choice involved, in most cases you get to take whatever your job provides, and that's that. Secondly, changing from one greedy insurance company filled with people who get bonuses for denying care to another such company gets you what, exactly? Certainly nothing in the way of increased value or better care, nothing of any substance. THERE IS NO CHOICE FOR THE CONSUMER UNDER THE CURRENT SYSTEM! There's barely even the illusion of choice.
I simply don't understand why the anti-single payer crowd can't see that there can be no true free market in health care, especially under the current system. Consumers are allowed no real choice about virtually any facet of the care they receive, in most cases it's not even possible to find out in advance what a given procedure will cost. Unless health care consumers have access to information like the true cost of medical tests and procedures, along with information about the competence and reliability of the professionals who administer them, nothing resembling a free market is possible. This is obvious, it's basic economic theory. Why is it so hard to admit that health care just might, just possibly might, be an area unsuited to a purely free market solution? Remember, emergency medical care must, by definition, be administered immediately, often without input from a potentially unconscious patient. No patient choice = no free market. It's that simple. And as we've seen, attempts to impose a pseudo-free market via private insurance companies simply leads to the mess we have now: 51st in life expectancy. For god sake, a single payer system is not just the most efficient way for a modern industrialized society to deal with health care, it's the only way! Anything else leads to a grossly unfair and unethical two or more tier system, and life expectancies comparable to third world countries. We can surely do better than that.
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Truth serum does not fucking work, period, at all. This has been known for many decades now. If it worked, we would've been using it against Bad Guys in Secret Prisons, and we're not. We're not because it doesn't fucking work and everyone knows that.
Except apparently the people in this court room.
Actually, there is one compound that might be considered effective as a "truth serum", and that's scopolamine. Read up on the way it has been used by criminals, for instance this link:
http://digitaljournal.com/article/324779 or this one: http://rense.com/general38/frug.htm or just google it.
I have personal experience with this drug, having been involuntarily dosed with it once, and it's effects were scary indeed, in a way no other substance has ever come close to matching. Essentially it wipes out your short-term memory completely, and I do mean completely. You start to say something but by the end of the sentence you literally can't remember what it was you were trying to say. You have no idea where you are or how you got there, and you tend to believe whatever you're told if there's someone there to "helpfully" fill in the blanks. People empty their bank account to strangers, give up passwords and PIN numbers, it's crazy. The thing is, it's only short-term memory that's affected, everything else is still there. So I don't see any reason why you couldn't be questioned about past criminal behavior as easily as your financial secrets. Having experienced this stuff first hand, I have no doubt it could be used as a truth drug, given the right setting and an experienced interrogator. That said, I'm absolutely against the whole idea and believe this is a treacherous road for the legal system to be going down. Voluntarily or otherwise, chemical interrogation has no place in American courtrooms.
I recently got a ticket for running a red light, not from a camera but a real cop. It had snowed the night before and the roads were still quite slippery. The light went yellow literally right at the tripping point, the moment where it could go either way and you have to make a split-second decision. I honestly felt that given the slick conditions there might be problems if I tried to stop, so I kept going - after all, I felt sure there was plenty of time to make it through. I did not speed up, I was absolutely not trying to run the light, I was just trying to do the right thing. Of course, the light went red so fast I couldn’t believe it, when I was almost but not quite directly underneath. The damn cop was right there and immediately pulled me over, it was all so suspiciously convenient, but what can you do? I explained to the cop I wasn’t trying to run the light, I wasn’t even in a hurry, I honestly felt it was safer to keep going and thought I had time to do so. His response was to inform me that the lights are timed to give drivers plenty of room to stop before they go red, and if I couldn’t stop safely then I must have been speeding. He actually started to write out another ticket for speeding! Or perhaps he just pretended to, I don’t know. Either way, it was obvious I would get no sympathy at all from him, so I just said “Yes sir, officer, whatever you say“ and meekly accepted the single $120 ticket he eventually gave me. I sent it in Not Guilty, which was probably overly optimistic and will cost me a day at court, but what the hell, I was honestly just trying to do the right thing, we'll see what happens with the prosecutor.
But it's the point about the light being calibrated to the speed limit that interests me. Is this a common practice, or a legally mandated thing? If so, what exactly is the perfect amount of yellow time for a stoplight on a 25 mph city street? Is there a table or formula somewhere that will give me this information? Is there even a universally accepted way to derive that time, or do different States have different ideas about what constitutes a safe stopping time? If there are in fact known safety durations, then I would imagine any light with a yellow time below that safety threshold should be challengeable in court. I would also bet that a lot of these for-profit camera operations are either setting the lights right at, or even below those safety thresholds. Does anyone know what the accepted standards really are in these situations? That info just might be of help to me when I go to court.
I've listened to long harangues from musicians about how unjust the music industry is, and it turns out all they need is $2,500 to put out an album that's already been written AND recorded. I just can't understand it -- if it's that important to you, if this is what you really want to do with your life, why wouldn't you just put $2,500 on your credit card and damn the consequences?
Boy, that's some assumption you're making there. Are you really so out of touch that you just assume every musician must have a credit card, let alone one with $2500 or more credit left on it? I wish you the best with your writing career, but you need to familiarize (or perhaps re-familiarize) yourself with the term "starving artist". It doesn't matter that you were once broke yourself, the fact remains that for a whole lot of musicians, especially those just starting out in the biz, or who come from low-income neighborhoods, yes, that kind of money is indeed going to be totally out of the question. If they do happen to have a credit card, it's already maxed out, believe me. Following your dreams is just not all that easy in modern-day America, not if you're one of the 99%.
The article mentioned Connecticut which isn't one of the vegetative states.
Clearly you don't live here.
While we're on the topic of warrantless wiretaps, there's something I've been trying to figure out.
Bush starts the warrantless wiretap thing, the reaction from the left is to fume with anger at the horrible abuse of power.
Obama continues it and adds in the whole "assassinate Americans using robotic aircraft" twist, and reaction from the same people is "I support the President on this, though I have mild reservations on a few aspects".
My question is... what the heck is up with that?
Well, there's the fact that when Bush did it it was clearly and unambiguously against the law. I freely admit that part bothered me no end. Of course, once the warrantless wiretapping became public knowledge Congress quickly passed a retroactive bill that supposedly legitimized the practice and made everything all hunky dory. Now, that law still doesn't make warrantless wiretapping right or even constitutional in my book, and I'm no big fan of a lot of what the Obama administration has done, to say nothing about my mixed feelings about the man himself... But, this does help explain why the issue was a much bigger deal to many people when Bush got caught doing it. It's the difference between a politician you hate who nonetheless gets fairly elected, and that same hated politician rigging an election in order to win. Nobody likes it when the first happens, but the latter tends to really piss people off.
If the hostage situation guaranteed that Carter couldn't be reelected, why didn't the Iraq war guarantee that Bush couldn't be reelected? The Iraq war was a much larger fuck-up by orders of magniuted. The public doesn't care if you fuck up. They care whether or not you swagger when you fuck up.
What makes you think Bush was legitimately reelected??
If someone would just point out to these people that even cheap hobbyist drones can be easily armed... With guns! You'd think the average Texan would be all for them, in that case. In fact, maybe we should get the NRA involved, I'm sure they could stop this bill in its tracks.
I think most people here are missing an interesting angle. Granted, the headline and summary are misleading, and the quoted article does seem to make way too much out of what was actually said by the prosecution, so not surprising that the discussion so far has focused mainly on those issues. But to my mind the most interesting thing in the original HuffPo article is the last paragraph. Check it out:
Some congressional staffers left the briefing with the impression that prosecutors believed they needed to convict Swartz of a felony that would put him in jail for a short sentence in order to justify bringing the charges in the first place, according to two aides with knowledge of the briefing.
I don't know, this seems like a rather damning admission by the prosecution if true, because it shows they knew damn well they were on shaky ground, and that they were playing to public perception rather than truly seeking justice. It is also IMO much more likely to be true than the "prosecuted for his political beliefs" angle, which seems debatable at best.
:
The US is simply doing it wrong - one of our politicians suggested outsourcing the imprisonment of the hardest criminals to Russia....
Yes, I kinda support that idea.
In Soviet Russia, the jails get sent to you!
every product is as valuable as the energy used to craft it
So what about the value of artwork, then? Have they finally quantified and measured creative energy? Are they able to determine the precise amount of beauty that resides in the eye of a given beholder? No, I didn't read the paper, but the whole thing sounds a bit too simplistic. True value is what people are willing to pay, nothing more, and nothing less.
I don't know why parent has been marked Funny - it should be marked insightful. Check this http://kanewj.com/wbc/
Insightful? Hardly. The author of that article you linked to is a moron. Westboro has a revenue stream from suing municipalities, which is their real raison d'etre? Right. Since most municipalities are legally immune from this type of lawsuit, it'd be nice to see some proof that such revenue-generating lawsuits actually exist, wouldn't it? Here's what the article actually offers instead: "I will tell you where I got this truth about Phelps. I looked him in the eye" Wow, that's convincing. It must be true! Um, no, sorry, but real truth is that Phelps & Co are as batshit crazy as they seem to be.
Question: If the designer was so intelligent, why did he/she/it equip certain cave organisms that live in total darkness with vestigial eyes that can't possibly be of any benefit to said organisms?
Extra credit: Why are those eyes nonfunctional, even if the organism is moved to a lighted environment?
This has the potential to be a genuinely big deal if the results hold up. Despite the article’s somewhat misleading title, the paper’s authors are not suggesting that we should just throw away the mouse model. They are saying that in one limited area, the treatment of sepsis (burns and trauma are also mentioned, but the emphasis is on sepsis) the mouse may not be the best organism to use as a model. According to their research, mice respond to sepsis in an entirely different manner than humans, with different genes and genetic pathways being activated. They back up this claim with very solid data, according to the independent researchers contacted by the Times. Moreover, as the article points out, there are good longstanding reasons to suspect the mouse model may be flawed in this area. Using the mouse model, which has become an essentially mandatory step under current drug R&D methodologies, no effective sepsis drug has ever been found that also works in humans. A different genetic response to sepsis would not only explain the drug development failure, but would make logical sense given the mouse’s constant exposure to high levels of bacteria and its garbage-ingesting lifestyle. The fact that it takes a million times as much bacteria to kill a mouse as a human suggests strongly that something fundamentally different is going on with the two species. We don’t of course know the real reasons why the paper was initially rejected by both Science and Nature, but the authors seem to be saying it was primarily a matter of disbelief: the mouse model is so strongly accepted and ingrained that the reviewers simply couldn’t accept that there might be a problem with it, and the fault must therefore lie with the paper. This is not at all an uncommon reaction when a longstanding scientific belief or paradigm is first challenged. The paper‘s authors seem pretty sure of themselves, and the outside experts interviewed in the article seem to be impressed with the general quality of the research. The authors are putting forward a well thought out and logical theory backed with solid data. I don’t believe we can dismiss the results as easily as some here are suggesting. It’s not my field, but this looks and smells like the real deal to me.
Yes that was the Bush policy, except you couldn't see a lawyer and you would never actually get a trial (maybe a military tribunal aka kangaroo court)
Not to mention the fact that even if you were found innocent, you wouldn't necessarily be released from Gitmo! I remember my disbelief at hearing senior Bush administration lawyers testify under oath that this was so: innocent verdicts would not mean the prisoner would be released. I knew then that the USA I grew up in and believed to be the best place in the world had long since begun to go bad. It's difficult to get all exercised over Obama's current failings, real though they be, the man is merely presiding over the festering corpse of a once great nation. The manner in which it rots seems relatively unimportant.
I have been listening to the same 20 songs for 5 years.
Congratulations, you appear to be perfectly qualified to work as program director for any contemporary commercial music-playing radio station. Now if you can just get that down to 15 or even 10 songs, your future with Clear Channel seems assured.
If it applies to innocents as well as the guilty, taking a deal is completely irrelevant and unrelated to actual guiltiness. Thus, you can't use the number of deals as measure to estimate that a majority is guilty.
If you take a deal, you are admitting you are guilty (of a lesser offence) and thus you are not innocent. Therefore, 100% of people taking deals are guilty, by definition.
If you're innocent, you don't plead guilty. No one is going to believe otherwise, unless you can prove you were actually tortured, or something.
You can't seriously believe this! Or is your post some kind of sarcasm? I listened for the whoosh, but... I have to assume you mean what you say. Clearly you have absolutely no conception of how the US justice system actually works in practice. The truth is that enormous numbers of people who absolutely firmly believe they are completely and factually innocent still plead guilty to a variety of crimes in US courtrooms every day. Frequently they do so on the direct advice of their lawyer. That's how it is, that's the problem, plea bargains are the norm and there is incredible pressure on a defendant not to take it to trial. Given the choice between the possibility of a lengthy prison sentences combined with likely ruinous legal fees, and an offer of a brief or suspended jail sentence and a small fine, it's not difficult at all to see how and why innocent people regularly plead guilty. No, they aren't tortured, but yes, there is an "or something" and I have just described it, it is the very real threat of ruination and long incarceration. The stakes are simply too high, most people fold and take the deal offered. As to the percentage who are actually innocent, no one knows, not you or me or the so-called experts. The system is simply so distorted by now that it is impossible to know the true number of innocent people fed into our meat grinder of a justice system. All you can do is pray it never happens to you.
The hippies would have had those bankers on their knees begging for mercy.
I don't think hippie means quite what you think it does. And FWIW I actually lived through those times, as I rather strongly suspect you did not.
Baloney. Corporations are made up of and owned by people. Every cent that a corporation retains in profits is returned to people in some manner, be it dividends, capital gains, business investment (spending) etc.
Flatly and obviously wrong on the face of it, unless you somehow think that obscenely bloated executive salaries and bonuses have no effect on a company's profits. But they do, and it's not even much of a mystery why the shareholders put up with it - you can Google any number of articles that attempt to explain why it's so hard for shareholders to rein in excessive executive compensation under the current system. Any way you look at it, it's absurd to claim that corporate money is always returned to "the people" when the last 20 years have proven just the opposite, with more and more corporate money being sucked up by less and less of the privileged few at the very top of the ladder. If contemporary US capitalism worked the way you seem to think it does, we probably wouldn't be in the financial mess we're currently in, but unfortunately it doesn't.
Oh and they can give "false positives" (not really false) if you eat too many poppy seeds from normal rather than opium poppies.
Off-topic, I know, but that isn't quite right, the reason for the potential false positives is that the seeds do indeed come from genuine opium poppies, there is no such thing as edible seed from "normal" poppies. Poppy seeds found in food products all derive from Papaver Somniferum AKA the opium poppy, and yes it has been proven that eating as little as a single poppyseed bagel can result in a positive test. The seeds contain very small amounts of opium, not enough to produce pharmacological effects, which is why you can eat them, but modern urinalysis is sensitive enough to pick up even trace amounts. Bottom line is you should never eat anything containing poppy seeds in the week before a piss test.
If you actually read the article, you would see that he is claiming zero knowledge of any illegal use of his software in NY State or anywhere else. All of his sales were to clients not based in the USA, and furthermore he claims that he carefully checked to insure all his clients were legitimately operating in areas where such gambling is perfectly legal. Supposedly the software is not even usually sold directly to the entities taking bets, it's more of a middleman situation where clients running his software would in turn provide services to actual bookmaking/gambling operations - and that may be how he got into trouble, because he would have no way of knowing if his clients were in turn offering services to illegal operations. Of course, it's possible he knew all along who the final users were going to be, and if the prosecution can prove this he will likely be found guilty and rightfully so, but it doesn't sound like they are trying to make that case. If you believe this guy is telling the truth, it really does seem like a case where he is being held accountable for what other people did with his code without his knowledge. The interesting angle is that he was only charged after he refused to install secret backdoor code at the behest of the FBI, who wanted him to secretly record the names and addresses of all the gamblers ultimately placing bets processed with his software. If true, that is rather chilling indeed. Given that virtually all software can be used to facilitate criminal acts of one kind or another, who knows how many software writers have caved in to similar demands and already installed precisely this kind of secret backdoor code?
The fact that meat consumption is so high is a much bigger problem than most people are willing to admit. Meat production is helping to starve people.
Actually, the latest research appears to give red meat a somewhat cleaner bill of health than you might expect: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=meat-of-the-matter-modern-methods-preserving-cooking-meat-healthy It turns out that it's just processed meats that are bad for you, not meat itself. I've always wondered how such a "natural" part of the human diet could be so unhealthy, and now we know: it probably isn't, not in and of itself. It's the preservatives and all the other crap added to processed meat that's the real problem.
Wouldn't going over the cliff solve that problem for the Republicans? The tax increases happen without them voting for them. Then they can start voting for tax decreases with a clear conscience.
Yes, exactly! And it is precisely this that scares the Republicans more than anything, that after the cliff the Democrats will start introducing tax breaks for the poor and middle class, which of course is legislation the GOP can hardly oppose, and so... Voila! Taxes on the rich have effectively been raised! Although in point of fact they likely won't even have been restored to Clinton-era levels, but I digress. Going off the cliff is a win for the Dems, unless the mere fact of it happening sends the Market into a tailspin, but Wall Street probably has just enough intelligent and level-headed traders to limit any disruption to a temporary blip. Really, I see going over the Dreaded Fiscal Cliff as something that might actually be good for the country, with very little downside. You heard it here first!
Moderators, please mod him up as informative. Here is the take away paragraph.
Sorry, I do have points, but... No can do, on the upmod. If you spend some time on any of the sites that are genuinely run by and for addicts and ex-addicts, you will find many, many personal stories posted by sometimes desperate addicts who have actually tried ibogaine therapy. The basic message seems to be, no, it does not work, with actual results that are a far cry from the way the drug has sometimes been portrayed in the media and in the few very limited and suspect studies done to date. Ibogaine is in the same category as so-called "ultra-rapid detox" type treatments, which is to say that while it does have its true believers, the vast majority of those who actually undergo the treatment don't see anything remotely like the promised results. Most discover this to their chagrin only after spending huge amounts of money. The sad truth is, there is currently no overnight and/or one-time procedure that will cure addiction. Of course there isn't, it's an extremely complex and still imperfectly understood condition with causes deeply-rooted in both personality and brain chemistry. So like the mythical free lunch, there simply is no such thing as a miracle cure for addiction, and I don't see much hope there ever will be.
And where does the power from heating the air come from?
Congress! Where else? Studies have shown that multiple tornadoes worth of hot air can at times be generated by even a single congressperson, it's just a matter of finding the right one. Yeah, I lost the link to those studies, but hey, you know it's true.
The difference is that with private insurance you can switch companies and try for a better policy and better service. It is also far more likely to be efficiently run, and therefore not go out of business or suddenly cut benefits like government run programs will have to do when the money runs out. With the government you've got exactly zero choices and if you don't like what they did what are you going to do? Sue them? Good luck with that.
Zero choices, eh? OK, you want to talk about choices?? First of all, in the US most health insurance is provided by one's employer, so there is effectively very little or no choice involved, in most cases you get to take whatever your job provides, and that's that. Secondly, changing from one greedy insurance company filled with people who get bonuses for denying care to another such company gets you what, exactly? Certainly nothing in the way of increased value or better care, nothing of any substance. THERE IS NO CHOICE FOR THE CONSUMER UNDER THE CURRENT SYSTEM! There's barely even the illusion of choice.
I simply don't understand why the anti-single payer crowd can't see that there can be no true free market in health care, especially under the current system. Consumers are allowed no real choice about virtually any facet of the care they receive, in most cases it's not even possible to find out in advance what a given procedure will cost. Unless health care consumers have access to information like the true cost of medical tests and procedures, along with information about the competence and reliability of the professionals who administer them, nothing resembling a free market is possible. This is obvious, it's basic economic theory. Why is it so hard to admit that health care just might, just possibly might, be an area unsuited to a purely free market solution? Remember, emergency medical care must, by definition, be administered immediately, often without input from a potentially unconscious patient. No patient choice = no free market. It's that simple. And as we've seen, attempts to impose a pseudo-free market via private insurance companies simply leads to the mess we have now: 51st in life expectancy. For god sake, a single payer system is not just the most efficient way for a modern industrialized society to deal with health care, it's the only way! Anything else leads to a grossly unfair and unethical two or more tier system, and life expectancies comparable to third world countries. We can surely do better than that.