The surprising thing is that most corporate pages have a "Criticism" section which usually has the major negative charges. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I often find something negative about a corporation (I'm particularly interested in drug company pricing) and include it in the company's page. It usually stays. The big problem on Wikipedia isn't paid corporate shills, as far as I can tell, but just assholes who defend corporations generally from their critics.
I think it would be dangerous for a large corporation to pay shills to alter their Wikipedia pages, especially on drug safety issues, because if they were sued, it would come out in discovery, and they would be liable for giving false reassurances.
My favorite example: Billy Tauzin. As representative from Louisiana, and chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Tauzin made sure that when Medicare finally included prescription drug coverage, Medicare wouldn't be able to set drug prices the way they do for doctors' services. Then he retired from Congress, and took a job as the head of PhRMA, the big drug industry lobbying group, for $2 million a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Tauzin claimed there was no quid pro quo.
As a result, we now have drugs that prevent the damage of auto-immune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis -- for $30,000 a year, and cancer drugs that will add 3 months of life expectancy -- for $100,000. Of course most patients couldn't afford this. The government pays for most of it.
Unfortunately we have no accountability, and in the US we don't even have a culture of accountability. In Germany and other countries, politicians like that would go to jail, not get relected. But here they just keep getting re-elected.
This is not a rational thing on the side of the prohibitionists. They simply claim that "God" told them porn was bad, so it obviously must be the truth.
That's not entirely fair. They also have science-based arguments. They simply claim that "God" told them there was scientific evidence that porn was bad.
This may require a lawyer to straighten it out, but a lawyer friend of mine (in New York State) told me that everything a lawyer says in court or submits to a court is considered to be under oath. A lawyer doesn't have to get his statements notarized, they're, in effect, already notarized. The signature at the end of the documents often says, "I hereby swear or affirm that the statements in the above document are true."
Lawyers would also be committing something like perjury if they knowingly allowed a defendant or witness to lie in court. This is a rule that defense lawyers follow, especially low-paid legal aid lawyers. That's why lawyers often say, "I don't want to know whether or not you committed the crime." This is a rule that prosecutors often ignore, and get away with.
This is what Lara Bazelon wrote in the Slate article:
Vinegrad then called his colleague, Deputy District Attorney Robert Spira, who was in charge of prosecuting Melendez. Under oath, Spira told the jury that Melendez had agreed to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter in exchange for Spira recommending a 14-year prison sentence. Spira was emphatic, however, that this deal was based solely on Melendez's decision to inform on his co-defendant in the Gomez murder. Melendez's testimony against Baca, Spira told the jury, had no bearing on the stateâ(TM)s leniency, which was substantial. Melendez's initial murder charges carried the possibility of a life sentence.
Several months before Baca's trial, Spira had made the same representation to Melendez's sentencing judge, H. Dennis Myers. The judge was incredulous that Melendez would testify against Baca simply out of the goodness of his heart, thinking, in Myers' words, "Well, heck, I will go up and testify in another murder case and just--I don't expect anything from them." Melendez's attorney chimed in, telling Myers that his client had in fact been "led to believe there would be a reward at the end of the rainbow...."
Although Melendez and Spira had perjured themselves, the judges found that their false testimony did not prejudice the outcome of the trial.
If you read the cases of The Innocence Project, where people were exonerated mostly with DNA evidence, you'll see that one of the most common reasons for false conviction is false testimony by a jailhouse snitch. Very often a prosecutor is forced to commit perjury in the process. I don't think a prosecutor has ever been punished for that.
And as Bazelon explains, the Republicans passed federal laws to make it difficult or impossible for federal courts to review state appeals court rulings, even when they are obviously wrong and outrageous, which is often.
Maybe it's because Americans don't know what it is like to truly live under a tyrannical rule as we really don't, and while or government does like to test (and break) the limits the Constitution places on them, it does not oppress the people com[pared to what true tyrants and dictators have done in the past. Do you really think your life would get better if you overthrew the US Government?
When I grew up in Brooklyn in the 1950s, I had a fair number of black teachers.
My favorite biology teacher was a young black woman who had worked as a lab technician. She taught me how to breed fruit flies and grow bacteria. That kind of favor, you don't forget.
I've also known a fair number of blacks who were successful in science and engineering.
I had a housemate in college who was studying chemical engineering. Never got to know him. He was always studying.
I remember a black guy who was working as a computer operator, stuff like changing tapes and printer paper. He heard about a job for a programmer. He got the programming manual, read it all night, lied about his qualifications, and started programming. He pulled it off. Brass balls. I really have to admire that.
In some ways, there was less racism back then. Blacks, Jews. Italians, Irish, Polish, men, women, they all worked together. If you knew calculus and electronics, you got respect. Unfortunately, identity politics tore everybody apart. The Southern backlash didn't do any good either.
On the bus ride to this first assignment (in Marion, VA), Katherine says she had her first experience with racism. She says when they crossed from West Virginia into Virginia, the bus stopped and all of the Black people had to move to the back, which Katherine did. Later, they had to change buses. All of the white passengers were allowed on the bus, but the Blacks were put into taxis. Katherine says the driver said âoeAll you colored folk, come over here.â But she would not move until he asked her politely.
Though her father had quit school after the sixth grade, he considered education of paramount importance for Katherine and her older siblings Charles, Margaret and Horace. Since the local schools only offered classes to African Americans through the eighth grade, he enrolled his children in a school that was 125 miles away from their home. Katherineâ(TM)s high school was part of the West Virginia Collegiate Institute (formerly the West Virginia Colored Institute). In 1929, the school was renamed West Virginia State College, and later it was renamed West Virginia State University. During the academic year, Mr. Coleman worked in White Sulphur Springs, while his wife and children resided near the school in Institute, West Virginia.....
Following in her motherâ(TM)s footsteps, Katherine began teaching in rural Virginia and West Virginia schools. Her first job was at an elementary school where she responded to a telegram that said if she could teach math and French, and play the piano, the job was hers.
On the bus ride to this first assignment (in Marion, VA), Katherine says she had her first experience with racism. She says when they crossed from West Virginia into Virginia, the bus stopped and all of the Black people had to move to the back, which Katherine did. Later, they had to change buses. All of the white passengers were allowed on the bus, but the Blacks were put into taxis. Katherine says the driver said "All you colored folk, come over here." But she would not move until he asked her politely. Katherine also said her mother warned her, "Remember, you're going to Virginia." And that she said, "Well, tell them I'm coming." Katherine says the racism was not as blatant in West Virginia as it was in Virginia.
If he was not under oath, he could lie easily. If he was, however, then he probably was telling the truth — lawmen tend to take that sort of thing seriously.
But he was quite explicit about continuing to search for other methods... The man is doing his job, I would not be jeering the way you do.
Half true. I heard of lawyers who were disbarred for lying under oath, and as a result lawyers take it seriously.
However, prosecutors do lie all the time, and get away with it. It's a rare judge who calls them to account for it.
http://www.slate.com/articles/... For Shame The criminal justice system encourages prosecutors to get guilty verdicts by any means necessary—and to stand by even the most questionable convictions. Can one crusading court stop the lying and cheating? By Lara Bazelon Slate April 7 2016
Cops, on the other hand, lie routinely, and almost always get away with it, even when they get caught on video. It happens in New York City all the time.
There was a demonstration against the Iraq war, where among their many violations of the Bill of Rights, the pigsxxxcops indiscriminately arrested people who were on the steps of the New York Public Library, demonstrators and uninvolved bystanders alike, and charged them with assaulting an officer.
Assaulting an officer is a felony, and if they insisted on defending themselves in court, they would have to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees, and would have been likely to get a felony conviction and a jail term, since juries usually believe pigsxxxxcops over defendants. So the prosecutor forces them to plead guilty to a misdemeanor that they never committed.
This time, there were videos, including the pigs' own videos, as well as the videos taken by bystanders, which clearly showed that the defendants weren't assaulting an officer, but instead were assaulted by the pigs without justification. I think they may have sued the city for false arrest. But I know that none of the pigs were charged with perjury. I once heard a city official on the radio explaining why they didn't. He said cops sign affadavits under oath all the time that they had seen a crime when they really didn't. In other words, the "everybody does it" defense. They basically admitted that cops routinely lie. One good thing that came out of it is that those cops can never appear on the witness stand themselves, because the dense lawyer can always bring up their false statements under oath in the past.
One of the beasts that the Republicans starved was the IRS fraud investigators.
The IRS discovered wholesale tax fraud by organizations claiming to be 401(c) organizations illegally using their tax-deductible contributions for political campaigns.
Many of these organizations had "Tea Party" and "Patriot" in the name, so the IRS used those key words to find applications to investigate http://www.motherjones.com/pol... It's as if you searched for organizations with "Jihad" in the name to find terrorists.
The Tea Party organizations and their Republican campaign fund recipients didn't like it when they got caught, so they responded by cutting the IRS budget. These were broad cuts, not only for fraud investigations but also for simple things like 800-number information lines (which they discontinued).
It got so bad that the IRS' Taxpayer Advocate, Nina Olson, blasted the IRS taxpayer services in her annual report as inadequate.
That's what happens when you starve the beast. You don't have any more government services. The only people who benefit are people who are committing fraud.
Moron. Do you know what the Taliban would do to a person like you if they had their way? They would cut your head off, literally. They consider you an infidel. It is nice to sit in your suburban house and wax romantically about politics, but the Taliban would literally cut your head off if they were allowed to.
Doctors Without Borders worked in Afghanistan for 30 years, delivering health care to all in need regardless of their politics or religion. They were unarmed and were respected by everyone.
They only ran into trouble when the US forces under Colin Powell started a program in which they delivered health care, food and other services to local people, in return for informing on the "terrorists." That made all foreign medical service providers suspect.
I wonder where you got the idea that the Taliban would cut off his head.
The Bay Area Rapid Transit system pushed transportation technology to the limit, in the 1970s. Trains didn't have conductors; they ran automatically, like self-service elevators.
Unfortunately BART also pushed technology beyond the limit. A robot car came into the Freemont station at the end of the line, didn't stop, and kept going--through the station and into the parking lot. The lawsuits over this and other problems came to about $250 million.
...and the Europeans nowadays no longer know how to protect their own people against invading savages...
I may have news for you:
Hitler is dead, and since then Europeans, Germans even, stopped killing people just because they are foreign.
The interesting thing to me, with my German/Jewish/Russian heritage, is that there were no "Germans" etc. during the time of this battle. They came from all over Europe, and Hitler's concept of "race" had no meaning for them. Two tribes who came from what we now call Germany, or France, or Italy, were as likely to be allies as enemies, as likely to be allied against other tribes from Germany, France or Italy, and as likely to intermarry.
There were no pure "races". The DNA seems to show continuous mixing. (The Jews were as close as you get to an exclusively interbreeding population, and if you go back before their European dispersal, they were interbreeding as much as everyone else.)
Another bronze-age example was the Egdtved girl http://news.nationalgeographic...http://humanities.ku.dk/news/2... who was revered as Denmark's national ancestor, when her tomb was discovered in 1921, turned out to be from the Black Forest. So there were no Germans, and there were no Danes.
The Black Panther Party probably made the most serious attempt at overthrowing the government in recent history. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug... Once they started carrying guns, Ronald Reagan signed the gun control laws in California.
Nobody was carrying guns in the Black Lives Matter demostrations. I think it was in the back of everybody's minds that they could carry guns if nonviolence didn't work.
They've already done that. All the pro-gun state laws that I've seen have an exception for carrying guns in the state's own legislature. And all the courts have an exception for carrying guns in their own courtroom.
Their argument is that they already have armed peace officers on their site so you don't have to protect yourself. But that doesn't make any sense.
So you believe that when I visited the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, and they told me that I couldn't bring guns into the visitors' gallery, they were violating the Constitution?
Well Ray, that's a very nice paper. I hope you got a B, assuming it was Freshman English or the equivalent.
Your instructor really should teach you to get both the arguments in support of your position and against it, as people have been doing since the ancient Greeks, which is what I learned in Freshman English. http://www.bartleby.com/130/2.... Makes a much more persuasive argument (assuming your position holds up). Scientific articles, legal papers, newspaper editorials, and other serious writing is written in a particular style which has been developed over 2,000 years, and is generally accepted in all its variations today. If you don't understand it you won't be able to understand the arguments that are going on around you, much less write them.
You should also take at least a good social science course which will teach you the different kinds of scientific evidence and how to evaluate them, such as the difference between opinions and evidence, and the difference between association and causation. Any professor who has published a research paper in a major journal would know these things.
You should also learn to research the previous research and opinions before you write your own.
On gun control, I stick to the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and the honest answer (even from the anti-gun researchers) is that nobody has good research or good answers because Congress cut the funding.
http://www.nature.com/news/und... Under the gun A ban on advocacy and promotion of gun control is keeping US agencies from conducting research that is sorely needed to inform policy on firearms and prevent shootings. 27 March 2013 Nature 495, 409 (28 March 2013) doi:10.1038/495409a
The irony is that the gun lobby and its congressional allies might benefit from rigorous research. Would a robust study reveal that state laws allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons have resulted in more or fewer deaths? We don't know. Would the spiking homicide rate in Chicago, Illinois, be higher still if it were not for the cityâ(TM)s restrictive gun laws, or are those laws ineffective? We don't know. Does a limit on assault weapons reduce the overall rate of firearms injuries and deaths? We don't know.
http://www.nature.com/news/fir... Firearms research: The gun fighter There are almost as many firearms in the United States as there are citizens. Garen Wintemute is one of few people studying the consequences. Meredith Wadman Nature 496, 412â"415 (25 April 2013) doi:10.1038/496412a
I too kind am kinda moderate about guns. On the one hand, I've done my research. Various gun laws have been enacted in various places, and we have the statistics to see what the results are. We don't have to predict what the results might be, we have the numbers. The facts show, unequivocally, that gun bans and strict gun laws are correlated with an increase in violent crimes, and a large increase in sexual assault and rape. That's just a fact- when politicians remove womens' ability protect themselves, many more women get raped. (I can provide a link to full statistics from official government sources , and further explanation, upon request).
Yes, I studied medical malpractice in some detail. I'm too sleepy now to look up the actual numbers, but the total cost of medical malpractice judgments in the US is about 2-3% (I think I saw that in the New England Journal of Medicine). So the savings would be a fraction of that 2-3% (unless you eliminate all medical malpractice torts, justified or not).
Some tort reformers claim that doctors are ordering useless tests to cover themselves against malpractice claims, but they don't have much data to prove it. Unnecessary tests haven't gone down in Texas. Doctors are ordering useless tests because they can bill for them.
Selling insurance in a new region or state takes more than just getting a license and including all the locally required benefits. It also involves setting up favorable contracts with doctors and hospitals so that customers will be able to get access to health care. Establishing those networks of health care providers can be hard for new market entrants.
"The barriers to entry are not truly regulatory, they are financial and they are network," said Sabrina Corlette, the director of the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute.
I think the Republicans are more willing than Democrats to sacrifice the interests of the Nation as a whole for their own partisan and selfish interests.
Back in the eighties, I was opening a bank account and the guy told me to pick a PIN. I pulled out my trusty Casio programmer's calculator, hit the random button 4 times, and wrote down the last digit of each.
I did something like that to get a random PIN, and the bank system rejected it because I had repeated the same digit twice in a row.
I know. I set up my own double-entry bookkeeping system by reading an accounting book and writing a set of spreadsheets. Started with Lotus, ported to Excel.
It was a book on corporate accounting. It might have been overkill to follow the instructions to get a system designed for a Fortune 500 company, but it was educational.
Yes, and before computers, accountants had clever systems in place (since 14th century Italy) to catch mistakes. That's why they use double entry.
Here's an example of how a doctor (and hospital pharmacist, and nurse) made a mistake on a computer that almost killed somebody, which they almost certainly wouldn't have made before computers.
At my own hospital, in 2013 we gave a teenager a 39-fold overdose of a common antibiotic. The initial glitch was innocent enough: A doctor failed to recognize that a screen was set on "milligrams per kilogram" rather than just "milligrams." But the jaw-dropping part of the error involved alerts that were ignored by both physician and pharmacist. The error caused a grand mal seizure that sent the boy to the I.C.U. and nearly killed him.
How could they do such a thing? It's because providers receive tens of thousands of such alerts each month, a vast majority of them false alarms. In one month, the electronic monitors in our five intensive care units, which track things like heart rate and oxygen level, produced more than 2.5 million alerts. It's little wonder that health care providers have grown numb to them.
Slashdot Mirror
The surprising thing is that most corporate pages have a "Criticism" section which usually has the major negative charges. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I often find something negative about a corporation (I'm particularly interested in drug company pricing) and include it in the company's page. It usually stays. The big problem on Wikipedia isn't paid corporate shills, as far as I can tell, but just assholes who defend corporations generally from their critics.
I think it would be dangerous for a large corporation to pay shills to alter their Wikipedia pages, especially on drug safety issues, because if they were sued, it would come out in discovery, and they would be liable for giving false reassurances.
My favorite example: Billy Tauzin. As representative from Louisiana, and chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Tauzin made sure that when Medicare finally included prescription drug coverage, Medicare wouldn't be able to set drug prices the way they do for doctors' services. Then he retired from Congress, and took a job as the head of PhRMA, the big drug industry lobbying group, for $2 million a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Tauzin claimed there was no quid pro quo.
As a result, we now have drugs that prevent the damage of auto-immune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis -- for $30,000 a year, and cancer drugs that will add 3 months of life expectancy -- for $100,000. Of course most patients couldn't afford this. The government pays for most of it.
Unfortunately we have no accountability, and in the US we don't even have a culture of accountability. In Germany and other countries, politicians like that would go to jail, not get relected. But here they just keep getting re-elected.
This is not a rational thing on the side of the prohibitionists. They simply claim that "God" told them porn was bad, so it obviously must be the truth.
That's not entirely fair. They also have science-based arguments. They simply claim that "God" told them there was scientific evidence that porn was bad.
This may require a lawyer to straighten it out, but a lawyer friend of mine (in New York State) told me that everything a lawyer says in court or submits to a court is considered to be under oath. A lawyer doesn't have to get his statements notarized, they're, in effect, already notarized. The signature at the end of the documents often says, "I hereby swear or affirm that the statements in the above document are true."
Lawyers would also be committing something like perjury if they knowingly allowed a defendant or witness to lie in court. This is a rule that defense lawyers follow, especially low-paid legal aid lawyers. That's why lawyers often say, "I don't want to know whether or not you committed the crime." This is a rule that prosecutors often ignore, and get away with.
This is what Lara Bazelon wrote in the Slate article:
Vinegrad then called his colleague, Deputy District Attorney Robert Spira, who was in charge of prosecuting Melendez. Under oath, Spira told the jury that Melendez had agreed to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter in exchange for Spira recommending a 14-year prison sentence. Spira was emphatic, however, that this deal was based solely on Melendez's decision to inform on his co-defendant in the Gomez murder. Melendez's testimony against Baca, Spira told the jury, had no bearing on the stateâ(TM)s leniency, which was substantial. Melendez's initial murder charges carried the possibility of a life sentence.
Several months before Baca's trial, Spira had made the same representation to Melendez's sentencing judge, H. Dennis Myers. The judge was incredulous that Melendez would testify against Baca simply out of the goodness of his heart, thinking, in Myers' words, "Well, heck, I will go up and testify in another murder case and just--I don't expect anything from them." Melendez's attorney chimed in, telling Myers that his client had in fact been "led to believe there would be a reward at the end of the rainbow...."
Although Melendez and Spira had perjured themselves, the judges found that their false testimony did not prejudice the outcome of the trial.
If you read the cases of The Innocence Project, where people were exonerated mostly with DNA evidence, you'll see that one of the most common reasons for false conviction is false testimony by a jailhouse snitch. Very often a prosecutor is forced to commit perjury in the process. I don't think a prosecutor has ever been punished for that.
And as Bazelon explains, the Republicans passed federal laws to make it difficult or impossible for federal courts to review state appeals court rulings, even when they are obviously wrong and outrageous, which is often.
Maybe it's because Americans don't know what it is like to truly live under a tyrannical rule as we really don't, and while or government does like to test (and break) the limits the Constitution places on them, it does not oppress the people com[pared to what true tyrants and dictators have done in the past. Do you really think your life would get better if you overthrew the US Government?
Sounds like you're not in one of those groups who have been oppressed in the US just like the way tyrants and dictators have done elsewhere. Like black people http://www.theatlantic.com/mag... or Communists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... or socialists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
When I grew up in Brooklyn in the 1950s, I had a fair number of black teachers.
My favorite biology teacher was a young black woman who had worked as a lab technician. She taught me how to breed fruit flies and grow bacteria. That kind of favor, you don't forget.
I've also known a fair number of blacks who were successful in science and engineering.
I had a housemate in college who was studying chemical engineering. Never got to know him. He was always studying.
I remember a black guy who was working as a computer operator, stuff like changing tapes and printer paper. He heard about a job for a programmer. He got the programming manual, read it all night, lied about his qualifications, and started programming. He pulled it off. Brass balls. I really have to admire that.
In some ways, there was less racism back then. Blacks, Jews. Italians, Irish, Polish, men, women, they all worked together. If you knew calculus and electronics, you got respect. Unfortunately, identity politics tore everybody apart. The Southern backlash didn't do any good either.
As to whether she's black I'd ask if she self-identifies as black.
I think the more significant question is whether the bus drivers in Virginia identified her as black.
http://www.visionaryproject.or...
http://www.visionaryproject.or...
Though her father had quit school after the sixth grade, he considered education of paramount importance for Katherine and her older siblings Charles, Margaret and Horace. Since the local schools only offered classes to African Americans through the eighth grade, he enrolled his children in a school that was 125 miles away from their home. Katherineâ(TM)s high school was part of the West Virginia Collegiate Institute (formerly the West Virginia Colored Institute). In 1929, the school was renamed West Virginia State College, and later it was renamed West Virginia State University. During the academic year, Mr. Coleman worked in White Sulphur Springs, while his wife and children resided near the school in Institute, West Virginia. ....
Following in her motherâ(TM)s footsteps, Katherine began teaching in rural Virginia and West Virginia schools. Her first job was at an elementary school where she responded to a telegram that said if she could teach math and French, and play the piano, the job was hers.
On the bus ride to this first assignment (in Marion, VA), Katherine says she had her first experience with racism. She says when they crossed from West Virginia into Virginia, the bus stopped and all of the Black people had to move to the back, which Katherine did. Later, they had to change buses. All of the white passengers were allowed on the bus, but the Blacks were put into taxis. Katherine says the driver said "All you colored folk, come over here." But she would not move until he asked her politely. Katherine also said her mother warned her, "Remember, you're going to Virginia." And that she said, "Well, tell them I'm coming." Katherine says the racism was not as blatant in West Virginia as it was in Virginia.
If he was not under oath, he could lie easily. If he was, however, then he probably was telling the truth — lawmen tend to take that sort of thing seriously.
But he was quite explicit about continuing to search for other methods... The man is doing his job, I would not be jeering the way you do.
Half true. I heard of lawyers who were disbarred for lying under oath, and as a result lawyers take it seriously.
However, prosecutors do lie all the time, and get away with it. It's a rare judge who calls them to account for it.
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
For Shame
The criminal justice system encourages prosecutors to get guilty verdicts by any means necessary—and to stand by even the most questionable convictions. Can one crusading court stop the lying and cheating?
By Lara Bazelon
Slate
April 7 2016
Cops, on the other hand, lie routinely, and almost always get away with it, even when they get caught on video. It happens in New York City all the time.
There was a demonstration against the Iraq war, where among their many violations of the Bill of Rights, the pigsxxxcops indiscriminately arrested people who were on the steps of the New York Public Library, demonstrators and uninvolved bystanders alike, and charged them with assaulting an officer.
Assaulting an officer is a felony, and if they insisted on defending themselves in court, they would have to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees, and would have been likely to get a felony conviction and a jail term, since juries usually believe pigsxxxxcops over defendants. So the prosecutor forces them to plead guilty to a misdemeanor that they never committed.
This time, there were videos, including the pigs' own videos, as well as the videos taken by bystanders, which clearly showed that the defendants weren't assaulting an officer, but instead were assaulted by the pigs without justification. I think they may have sued the city for false arrest. But I know that none of the pigs were charged with perjury. I once heard a city official on the radio explaining why they didn't. He said cops sign affadavits under oath all the time that they had seen a crime when they really didn't. In other words, the "everybody does it" defense. They basically admitted that cops routinely lie. One good thing that came out of it is that those cops can never appear on the witness stand themselves, because the dense lawyer can always bring up their false statements under oath in the past.
One of the beasts that the Republicans starved was the IRS fraud investigators.
The IRS discovered wholesale tax fraud by organizations claiming to be 401(c) organizations illegally using their tax-deductible contributions for political campaigns.
Many of these organizations had "Tea Party" and "Patriot" in the name, so the IRS used those key words to find applications to investigate http://www.motherjones.com/pol... It's as if you searched for organizations with "Jihad" in the name to find terrorists.
The Tea Party organizations and their Republican campaign fund recipients didn't like it when they got caught, so they responded by cutting the IRS budget. These were broad cuts, not only for fraud investigations but also for simple things like 800-number information lines (which they discontinued).
It got so bad that the IRS' Taxpayer Advocate, Nina Olson, blasted the IRS taxpayer services in her annual report as inadequate.
That's what happens when you starve the beast. You don't have any more government services. The only people who benefit are people who are committing fraud.
Moron. Do you know what the Taliban would do to a person like you if they had their way? They would cut your head off, literally. They consider you an infidel. It is nice to sit in your suburban house and wax romantically about politics, but the Taliban would literally cut your head off if they were allowed to.
Doctors Without Borders worked in Afghanistan for 30 years, delivering health care to all in need regardless of their politics or religion. They were unarmed and were respected by everyone.
They only ran into trouble when the US forces under Colin Powell started a program in which they delivered health care, food and other services to local people, in return for informing on the "terrorists." That made all foreign medical service providers suspect.
I wonder where you got the idea that the Taliban would cut off his head.
https://www.nasw.org/users/nba...
The Bay Area Rapid Transit system pushed transportation technology to the limit, in the 1970s. Trains didn't have conductors; they ran automatically, like self-service elevators.
Unfortunately BART also pushed technology beyond the limit. A robot car came into the Freemont station at the end of the line, didn't stop, and kept going--through the station and into the parking lot. The lawsuits over this and other problems came to about $250 million.
They could tell ballads, and pass them on that way.
However, they couldn't record the ballads. They didn't have digital recorders back then. They didn't even have vinyl.
...and the Europeans nowadays no longer know how to protect their own people against invading savages...
I may have news for you:
Hitler is dead, and since then Europeans, Germans even, stopped killing people just because they are foreign.
The interesting thing to me, with my German/Jewish/Russian heritage, is that there were no "Germans" etc. during the time of this battle. They came from all over Europe, and Hitler's concept of "race" had no meaning for them. Two tribes who came from what we now call Germany, or France, or Italy, were as likely to be allies as enemies, as likely to be allied against other tribes from Germany, France or Italy, and as likely to intermarry.
There were no pure "races". The DNA seems to show continuous mixing. (The Jews were as close as you get to an exclusively interbreeding population, and if you go back before their European dispersal, they were interbreeding as much as everyone else.)
Another bronze-age example was the Egdtved girl http://news.nationalgeographic... http://humanities.ku.dk/news/2... who was revered as Denmark's national ancestor, when her tomb was discovered in 1921, turned out to be from the Black Forest. So there were no Germans, and there were no Danes.
The Black Panther Party probably made the most serious attempt at overthrowing the government in recent history. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug... Once they started carrying guns, Ronald Reagan signed the gun control laws in California.
Nobody was carrying guns in the Black Lives Matter demostrations. I think it was in the back of everybody's minds that they could carry guns if nonviolence didn't work.
They've already done that. All the pro-gun state laws that I've seen have an exception for carrying guns in the state's own legislature. And all the courts have an exception for carrying guns in their own courtroom.
Their argument is that they already have armed peace officers on their site so you don't have to protect yourself. But that doesn't make any sense.
So you believe that when I visited the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, and they told me that I couldn't bring guns into the visitors' gallery, they were violating the Constitution?
Well Ray, that's a very nice paper. I hope you got a B, assuming it was Freshman English or the equivalent.
Your instructor really should teach you to get both the arguments in support of your position and against it, as people have been doing since the ancient Greeks, which is what I learned in Freshman English. http://www.bartleby.com/130/2.... Makes a much more persuasive argument (assuming your position holds up). Scientific articles, legal papers, newspaper editorials, and other serious writing is written in a particular style which has been developed over 2,000 years, and is generally accepted in all its variations today. If you don't understand it you won't be able to understand the arguments that are going on around you, much less write them.
You should also take at least a good social science course which will teach you the different kinds of scientific evidence and how to evaluate them, such as the difference between opinions and evidence, and the difference between association and causation. Any professor who has published a research paper in a major journal would know these things.
You should also learn to research the previous research and opinions before you write your own.
On gun control, I stick to the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and the honest answer (even from the anti-gun researchers) is that nobody has good research or good answers because Congress cut the funding.
http://www.nature.com/news/und...
Under the gun
A ban on advocacy and promotion of gun control is keeping US agencies from conducting research that is sorely needed to inform policy on firearms and prevent shootings.
27 March 2013
Nature 495, 409 (28 March 2013) doi:10.1038/495409a
The irony is that the gun lobby and its congressional allies might benefit from rigorous research. Would a robust study reveal that state laws allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons have resulted in more or fewer deaths? We don't know. Would the spiking homicide rate in Chicago, Illinois, be higher still if it were not for the cityâ(TM)s restrictive gun laws, or are those laws ineffective? We don't know. Does a limit on assault weapons reduce the overall rate of firearms injuries and deaths? We don't know.
http://www.nature.com/news/fir...
Firearms research: The gun fighter
There are almost as many firearms in the United States as there are citizens. Garen Wintemute is one of few people studying the consequences.
Meredith Wadman
Nature 496, 412â"415 (25 April 2013) doi:10.1038/496412a
Abortion/STD hot line.
That was an interesting post.
I too kind am kinda moderate about guns. On the one hand, I've done my research. Various gun laws have been enacted in various places, and we have the statistics to see what the results are. We don't have to predict what the results might be, we have the numbers. The facts show, unequivocally, that gun bans and strict gun laws are correlated with an increase in violent crimes, and a large increase in sexual assault and rape. That's just a fact- when politicians remove womens' ability protect themselves, many more women get raped. (I can provide a link to full statistics from official government sources , and further explanation, upon request) .
OK, where are the statistics?
Yes, I studied medical malpractice in some detail. I'm too sleepy now to look up the actual numbers, but the total cost of medical malpractice judgments in the US is about 2-3% (I think I saw that in the New England Journal of Medicine). So the savings would be a fraction of that 2-3% (unless you eliminate all medical malpractice torts, justified or not).
Some tort reformers claim that doctors are ordering useless tests to cover themselves against malpractice claims, but they don't have much data to prove it. Unnecessary tests haven't gone down in Texas. Doctors are ordering useless tests because they can bill for them.
Wikipedia has a decent article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... I'd recommend starting with the NEJM references.
Interestingly, interstate competition is legal in a few states, but they haven't succeeded in the free market.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09...
Selling insurance in a new region or state takes more than just getting a license and including all the locally required benefits. It also involves setting up favorable contracts with doctors and hospitals so that customers will be able to get access to health care. Establishing those networks of health care providers can be hard for new market entrants.
"The barriers to entry are not truly regulatory, they are financial and they are network," said Sabrina Corlette, the director of the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute.
I think the Republicans are more willing than Democrats to sacrifice the interests of the Nation as a whole for their own partisan and selfish interests.
You can parse McConnell's quotes yourself. https://www.washingtonpost.com...
I did something like that to get a random PIN, and the bank system rejected it because I had repeated the same digit twice in a row.
I know. I set up my own double-entry bookkeeping system by reading an accounting book and writing a set of spreadsheets. Started with Lotus, ported to Excel.
It was a book on corporate accounting. It might have been overkill to follow the instructions to get a system designed for a Fortune 500 company, but it was educational.
Yes, and before computers, accountants had clever systems in place (since 14th century Italy) to catch mistakes. That's why they use double entry.
Here's an example of how a doctor (and hospital pharmacist, and nurse) made a mistake on a computer that almost killed somebody, which they almost certainly wouldn't have made before computers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03...
At my own hospital, in 2013 we gave a teenager a 39-fold overdose of a common antibiotic. The initial glitch was innocent enough: A doctor failed to recognize that a screen was set on "milligrams per kilogram" rather than just "milligrams." But the jaw-dropping part of the error involved alerts that were ignored by both physician and pharmacist. The error caused a grand mal seizure that sent the boy to the I.C.U. and nearly killed him.
How could they do such a thing? It's because providers receive tens of thousands of such alerts each month, a vast majority of them false alarms. In one month, the electronic monitors in our five intensive care units, which track things like heart rate and oxygen level, produced more than 2.5 million alerts. It's little wonder that health care providers have grown numb to them.