>> ^gwiz665:

Alcohol is not the killer, the gun is. You can't kill anyone with alcohol, you need the car (or a weapon).
>> ^Psychologic:
>> ^gwiz665:
This is why amateurs should not have guns and this is why gun laws in the states are also crazy.
Might as well outlaw alcohol too then. Idiot drunks kill people on the highway, so obviously no one can be trusted to drink.
On a side note, I know an "Alcohol Enforcement Officer"... drinks more than anyone I've ever met, and not in a good way.



the same could be said for guns. it takes someone pulling the trigger to kill.

i do want to add a bit of commentary on these developing stories. between this and the jose guerera case, both cases piss me right the fuck off and heres why. In both instances you have an overwhelming force subduing another. in this case, gun toting cop vs knife toting dude. in jose's case, an entire swat team vs one armed man. the end result was death, fucking wrongful, wasteful death.

now having said that, the commentary i would like to add is this: i know that in armed conflict and escalating situations such as these (presumably, even hypothetically, ie, he could have charged the cop with the knife off screen and an attacker can close distance in most cases faster than the shooter can react and fire) it takes steel nerves and lightning reflexes reinforced by training to make the decision to fire or not fire.

........however, when i was in afghanistan, i found myself in the middle of a legit "mexican standoff". long story short, my PCC team were to accompany the scout platoon to escort a rogue afghan border patrol police general back to our FOB to speak with his superiors. When we arrived to our PCC compound we found that he was there, along with over 100 of his loyals, preparing to mount a raid of their own (they were usually running illegal checkpoints, shit like that). Naturally when they figured out that we were there to detain their leader (in their eyes, our direct orders were to not detain but persuade him to come with us, if he refused we were to leave without incident). My CO talked with the general and persuaded him to willingly come with us.....but to his loyals, we were capturing him. within seconds, the guards they had in their towers had oriented their crew served weapons inwards, ANP loyals were loading their RPG's with armor piercers and taking fighting positions behind buildings oriented at us, you could hear dozens of ak's "racking" (chambering a round). There was over a hundred of them and less than 20 of us. Had it exploded into a firefight, we certainly woulved fucked all shit up.......but few, if any, of us were leaving alive. all it wouldve taken was one round to go off from either side to fully escalate that encounter to a full on gun battle. fortunately we kept our cool (as did the anp loyals), assessed the situation, navigated the battle space, reinforced by our training which emphasizes self control, discipline, and situational awareness, and we were able to diffuse the situation without incident. Not a single round was fired. and we had accomplished our mission (btw turns out the general had been hoarding police gun stocks, by the thousands, and had cached them at his house and was selling them off to taliban)

now my point being if i and the members of my team had the intestinal fortitude and mental tenacity to diffuse that highlyvolatile situation without incident, especially considering the higher stakes (this was in the middle of a fucking war, not in someones neighborhood or on a crosswalk), so to speak.......what is your fucking excuse Tucson swat team? what is your fucking excuse, cop in this video?

"Yes and the gullible hoards are once again captivated by the Royal Inbred Posse as they step out onto the veranda at Buckingham Palace en-masse. The prince, now Duke of Cambridge (whatever the fuck that means), wore the red tunic of an Irish Guards colonel (a title of which he would only be able to aspire to should he ever have had to work a day in his life), and his lovely wife and now "duchess of "who-gives-a-whiff" Kate "Commoner" Middleton, have planned a week of celebrations which will cost roughly the same as the GDP of Bolivia."

"Moron these stories as we develop new ways of diverting attention from the fact that we are waggling you in the bottom while we continue our plans to destroy the planet prior to implementing mass genocide, after these messages from your controlers.
Consciousness will return, after gentle massages."

I could see the clock-constrained carefully hoarded panic in his kohl-enhanced eyes. I could sense the stress as his hair attempted to statically ignore gravity while preserving its crispy blow-dried wantonly random yet precisely organized chaotic state. And I could actually feel the...

oh, hell. enough.

Awesome sift. Kudos to an incredibly creative individual.

Well throbbin had a way of bogarting the polls. I don't know if he was unaware that you could only have one poll out at a time, or he just thought it was funny to hoard them, but I think the ruling to make polls sift-related was a rule meant to be broken on occasion, if not abused. I don't think this survey is abuse. Plus I'm me, so I'm great.

Let me give you something more to work with:

xXx xXx Rah! Rah! Rah! Capitalizm sux! Socialism rulez! Capitalism redistributes wealth to the super rich at the expense of the underclasses! Socialism redistributes stagnant wealth from those who hoard to those in need! Long live the proletariat! From each according to his ability! Seize the means of production! Power to the people! This land is your land, this land is my land! 911 is a joke in this town! Barbara Streisand has a posse! Meat is murder! xXx xXx

Better?

The only thing I will add to this vitriolic stew is following:

It is hard to roast a late 30-something douchebag who clearly lives alone in his parents basement. I have come to know MrFist from a previous internet forum, except there his name was MrFiskers.

I am not sure why he came to El Sift, originally. My guess is he bonded with a fellow cat lover over a video they mutually masterbated over.

Look, we are talking about a guy who trips on acid alone in his parents basement. Imagine a room where even the carpet is painted black and a dozen or so cats roam free under the intense glow of black lights. Here in this cavern, lives our sad little MFist. In place that no woman has gone since Jenny Mazbaker wondered down there looking for a bathroom when his older brother John threw a Culture Club party in 86. We all would be ignorant of his parents shame, save for the fact that John's wife Stacy called animal planet.

MrFist deserves our pitty, out acceptance, like a sheep that has strayed to far from reality and has been sucked into the chasm of WoW.

.
.
.
Oh, crap. We are roasting MrFisK not MrFisT. Wow. My bad dude. You are cool. Punisher Rocks! I was thinking we were roasting @blankfist again. Mia culpa.

>> ^vaporlock:

You took the words right out of my mouth.>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
Assange needs to pick up the pace.



Yeah, you can't help but notice that Assange now has a very strong motivation not to reveal things from the insurance file, because obviously doing so makes it useless as insurance. But not putting the information out there is a betrayal to the leakers who were under the impression he would make the documents public; and not merely hoard them to bolster his hand. Then again, in this case "his hand" is what keeps him from getting murdered, so it's hard to blame him.

What honks me off is that this deal is being called a compromise.

Sounds to me Republicans are getting everything they want regarding the tax cuts. How exactly is that a compromise? Silly me, I thought compromises were when neither side got everything they wanted but enough to move forward.

I'd be behind the tax cuts if there were some sort of stipulation to them. We've had these tax cuts since 2001...where the hell is that massive growth that trickle down economics is supposed to provide? The answer is that there was none. Trickle down is Simply....Not...Efficient. The vast majority of those tax cuts don't go toward economic growth, they go right into the wealthy's already obscenely large hoard.

If these tax cuts for the wealthy were somehow conditional, as in you only get them if you can document that you've put money into your company and hired more employees, then I would be willing to support tax cuts more. But we all know that will never happen.

Im just patiently waiting for the day that America collectively realizes that growth doesn't start at the top and trickle down, it starts at the bottom and grows upwards. Anything less is just a scam to make rich people even more rich.

@BansheeX I think anyone who promotes the idea of a return to a gold standard has to realize that deflation is just as bad, if not worse than inflation.

What we're seeing right now in the economy is the effect of mere disinflation (i.e. a drop in the rate of inflation), and the result is lots of unemployment, and very low investment in actual economic activity because it's far too attractive to hoard cash (or more accurately financial assets so safe they're as good as cash).

Part of how you break out of that cycle is to create an expectation of inflation, and you have no hope of that under a gold standard, because you can't increase the money supply. In fact, you're guaranteed to see a steady rate of deflation whenever your population grows, or your economy tries to expand and that will put a drag on growth.

I don't think there's much of a case to be made that the Fed is unconstitutional (and what case there is rests on the word "coin" carrying a lot more weight than the phrase "regulate the value thereof" which follows it). Even if some SCOTUS ruled it unconstitutional, you'd see an amendment to the Constitution passed before you can say the phrase "the Senator from Goldman Sachs". Like Cenk said, our government is nothing but quick and efficient when it comes to serving the interests of the rich and powerful.

Which ultimately is what I think Cenk said that carries the most weight -- the problem isn't that the Fed exists and has the power to do things like this, it's that the actions it takes are quick and decisive when banks and investors are in trouble, but regular people not so much.

In this case, the Fed bought a lot of toxic assets at face value. I like this a lot more than Congress authorizing treasury to do the same thing, because unlike Treasury and Congress, the Fed can just print the money rather than borrow it. We don't have to pay interest on those dollars to anyone, and we don't need to collect them back with taxes, either. We might see inflation, but right now inflation would be good for the economy.

What the Fed could have done instead is print up money and give it to people to pay off their mortgages. In effect it could still do this by just writing off the toxic assets it holds, and not foreclosing on the mortgages it has on its balance sheet. It may still do this, and I suspect it will have to for some percentage of them. I also expect right-wing people to bitch about "moral hazard" and lazy parasites mooching off the producers in society if/when it happens.

Ultimately, the only downside to any of what the Fed is doing is that it might lead to inflation. But so far nothing it's done has created even the slightest increase in the year-over-year inflation rate, which is already well below the 2% target. Furthermore, all market indicators are predicting inflation of essentially 0% as far out as 7 years, even though the scale of the Fed's actions are public knowledge.

I dont see why he would hoard that bench all to himself when he is not even using it. Other then that no complaints from this guy. Nice stuff.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

This is great - I hope she doesn't come on. It sounds like he's hoarding some doozies. She's a trainwreck of Palinesque proportions.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

This was the main idea of Communism. Distribution of wealth to all, based on need. IMO, the basic problem is that self interest, Adam Smith's old invisible hand - seems to always come around a fuck up the best intended ideas. >> ^looris:

>> ^sillma:
What a load of hippie bullshit. Living in cloud castles thinking how wonderful it'd be to have a no-tax utopia is all nice and fine, but thinking that it's actually possible when humans are basically still just animals is stupid. They NEED a controlling government to make their life seem to have purpose, and to further the development of mankind. Maybe one day such a fool's dream would be possible, but not without limitless resources, energy and/or gene manipulation of human behaviour.

Actually, there already are enough resources for everyone to live wealthy.
The problem is that they are not shared, to the point that a few people have a hoard of resources, and a lot of people have much less than they need.

>> ^sillma:

What a load of hippie bullshit. Living in cloud castles thinking how wonderful it'd be to have a no-tax utopia is all nice and fine, but thinking that it's actually possible when humans are basically still just animals is stupid. They NEED a controlling government to make their life seem to have purpose, and to further the development of mankind. Maybe one day such a fool's dream would be possible, but not without limitless resources, energy and/or gene manipulation of human behaviour.


Actually, there already are enough resources for everyone to live wealthy.

The problem is that they are not shared, to the point that a few people have a hoard of resources, and a lot of people have much less than they need.

As long as they're spending all the money they can instead of hoarding it, that's OK with me.

>> ^jwray:

If people aren't investing in T-Bills, they're either going to invest that money somewhere else or hoard it under their mattress. So deficit spending will help when confidence is low but won't be worthwhile at other times.
Ideally T-Bill interest rates shouldn't even be as much as inflation. You should actually have to make an informed choice and take a risk to make money, rather than participating in an ever-snowballing hereditary aristocracy.


The price on T-bills is set by auction, and I'm not so sure it'd be a wise idea to put a thumb on the scale with them. If we systematically undervalued them, then people who (randomly?) got them for less than others were willing to pay would just sell them to the people willing to pay more.

As for stopping a snowballing hereditary aristocracy, you can't eliminate the market for safe investment instruments entirely. For example, you can still buy Canadian debt, British debt, German debt, Japanese debt, AT&T debt, Microsoft debt, McDonald's debt, WalMart debt, etc.

Besides which, that's not how the snowballing hereditary aristocracies I'm familiar with have maintained an empire. Instead they hire talented people to manage their investments to maximize return while managing risk, and enjoy the endless flood of riches that result.

It seems like estate taxes, capital gains taxes, progressive income taxes and the like are the only reliable way to stop hereditary aristocracies from snowballing into virtual monarchies.