I just watched House of Cards (American) so you can rule out Netflix programming, too.

http://www.gamechup.com/kevin-spacey-uses-ps-vita-on-netflix-show-house-of-cards/

Spoof of House of Cards. Very great TV show staring Kevin Spacey on Netflix. Kevin plays the House Majority Whip, a Representative from Georgia who was supposed to become the Secretary of State when the President won, but got passed over, the show follows him, lots of breaking the fourth wall... amazing show. Worth the price of Netflix alone. That said, yeah, a description should have been put in...

*sniff* I smell corruption.

They want you to believe they know WTF they are doing. When it doesn't look right, they just blame the "uninformed" for what ends up happening.

Much like everyone keeps saying that huge housing bubble that happened falls at the feet of the people taking the loans for over a decade.....not the people who were lying about everything throughout the process and kept doing shady shit up until the house of cards collapsed. And now keep fucking up foreclosures in a myriad of ways.........


Those poor pitiful victims, those corporations......it's sad how all of the outrageous BS they keep trying to force into existence comes back to fuck everyone in the end. It's just a few make a whole shitload of money off it in the meantime.

Anymore if they can't plainly explain how something works or how they gain profits, which they will have you believe are their "secrets", just assume they are gaming you or someone else and it's all a house of cards waiting to fall.

Earning money doing nothing productive is crazy that should not be supported, yet the government actively helps pass laws to make these things legitimate......hell it looks like something the mafia would do. Except sometimes the mafia takes as little as 1/20th out of it.....these guys are taking 20% and basically crippling everything systematically and infiltrating the government while they hide all their "donations".

Blah.

@renatojj

Church has high interested in religious candidates being elected. Most of the debates going on in politics are based on religious philosophy. Few off the top of my head are abortion, creationism, and women's rights. They've been going against the grain of the Constitution trying to get creationism which is a arguably religion based subject taught in schools. Which in turn possibly gets them more followers, which in turn gets them more tithing and more people in their "group" giving them more power. In fact I would argue they are specifically trying to erode the line between church and state with these arguments, injecting religion based reasons into many of the arguments.

Big media networks push for things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996 where the reason for the bill is not actually what ends up happening. It was supposed to deregulate and open up the market for competition and instead it allowed them to reconsolidate by buying up competitors. And they largely don't fight with censorship on curse words because generally it drives off their audience, and those networks that don't have to censor curse words charge for the privilege of hearing them and seeing some nudity to boot. And they also support SOPA-like bills which are essential a blanket tool to censor the web....they also support monitoring and traffic shaping on the networks they control...which is another potential avenue for censorship.

You'll have to be more specific on what you're getting at......all these groups are eroding divisions we built through regulation and have been doing so steadily since the 80s at every opportunity across industries.

I've already shown that given the chance, they buy up competition to remain a monopoly. Look at ISPs, look at all the oil companies we USED to have. Look at the media conglomerates that own the majority of your radio stations ( I think there's two major radio networks, but they have like a million different stations under the same banners so it LOOKS like choice). How the record labels and movie industries are all tied together and often even tied into the same parent company that owns your ISP. Cell phone industry, ATT trying to buy T Mobile which would have brought it down to 3 major providers and they did it in the name of "better service" but still haven't announced plans to build out their infrastructure since the deal went through...why? Because it wasn't about better service, it was about buying up a competitor that offered plans at prices people preferred.

When people are unhappy with their ISPs they've tried to form local government run coop non-profit ISPs, and they get sued by the huge companies who refuse to service their area. It's happened multiple times. With regulation, they would have to provide internet to those places in a timely manner instead of preventing people from doing their own thing.

Did GoDaddy pay dearly for supporting SOPA? I heard they lost 30k subscribers at some point, but did they really? You'll have to show me on that. GoDaddy did lots of terrible things before it, yet they were still a huge provider and still are. They cybersquat on domain names people search for and allow you to buy them at "auction" from them when you try to look up if it's taken or not..they snatch it up to sell to you. They also give away people's domain names with no repercussions and a myriad of other things. Sounds like it needs a regulatory body with some teeth on it to make them act right or shut them down.

Unions are actually a really good way to fight monopolies and under the table deals, but they've been systematically villified. And unions aren't monopolies if they aren't mandatory, and most places are not fully unionized anymore. Often times they will have sections with union employees to do government work and non-union to do non-government work. Non-union guys make half the rate of union guys usually, and have less protections in place to keep themselves from getting shafted. But I don't really see how a union is a monopoly when there are lots of unions and lots of individuals in a union who make decisions for themselves and not as a collective like a company would. IE a company has a "head" that directs it and unions are a collective of individuals. Companies are people after all, unions are not (they are made up of people).

There are laws governing behavior usually based roughly on societal standards. Like pot being illegal is kind of against most of the societies beliefs, yet it remains illegal is an example of where it doesn't quite track. But overall we have laws that say you can't write a check that you know won't cash. Drunk driving, trespassing, vandalism, theft.....yelling fire in a crowded building.......setting off the fire alarm for fun.....etc. Giving people the finger isn't against the law....well probably not in most places so that might fall under social pressure. But we see that social pressure fails miserably at stopping bad behavior, so we have laws to enforce behavior...like not stealing and not murdering. This is society and people holding other people to standards, without the law to judge and convict them by the only thing you have left is personal interpretation and meeting out punishment by each individual or vigilante justice.

If you don't regulate business there is nothing stopping them, because nothing about our market is free. You can't have a free market without perfect information. You can't know every possible thing going on, so you will never have perfect information even if it was possible. So you will have swindlers and knock offs, pyramid schemes, etc. And without laws and regulations on these things, you will never be able to punish the company for what they did in a court of law.

Even if they were 100% above the board honest, they'd still be sourcing their materials from overseas and getting inferior materials to what you are paying for. It happens to the military all the time right now. They buy a bunch of nuts and bolts and some of them are chinese knockoffs that fail well after the installation is done and the machine is in operation. They can't catch them because china is basically lawless when it comes to producing goods for knock off purposes. It could just as easily be a US source doing it if we de-regulated everything and made no way for people to sue them into oblivion...because the damage would be done as soon as you buy a knock off and it fries the rest of your stuff.

The definition of "free market" right now means they want to be able to buy stuff cheap as shit from overseas and charge you US built prices for it. And when it comes to financial industry "free market" means they want to have speculation upon speculation to where the financial industry has 10-100x more money leveraged than what actually exists. It's a house of cards if they can just inflate it without any kind of acceptable risks being enforced.

They can't even find what's left of the house of cards!

>> ^cosmovitelli:

@bcglorf
I think it's about where you start from. Without opportunistic pillaging in these countries they wouldn't be a threat at all.
In fact they wouldn't have gunpowder let alone stinger missiles.
Obviously you can't unscramble the pudding and those now involved have to deal with it every day until the empire collapses under the weight (and this is the reason they all have sooner or later, ask the Brits, ottomans, romans etc). Still at least a couple of hundred fat families got a bit fatter - and will be able to buy large stakes in what comes next..
Btw as for Pakistan there was a whistleblower about nuclear secrets leaking who got totally crushed by the US gov a few years back. Pakistan going nuclear was a VERY shady episode that no-one seems to be free to speak about yet. Or maybe it's just slipped into the national ADHD..


I agree with it being where you start from, or with how you see our world. When I look at human history, I don't see any point in it where opportunistic pillaging wasn't the order of the day for whomever was strongest or able to. Perhaps that's why my bar for calling a national action 'good' is different, my view of history leaves me with extremely low expectations.

Pakistan has slipped into the national ADHD on the commoner level. At the decision making level, there has appeared to be a coordinated effort to say very little about Pakistan. I think largely due to the (IMHO correct)belief that Pakistan's current political environment is a giant house of cards being kicked at from all directions. Mark my words, by the end of this year I expect to see Pakistan once again under military rule. Currently it looks like the guise will be court appointed military rule to restore order and enable democratic elections in the near future.

The military leadership has consistently benefited from maintaining a degree of internal conflict and instability between the tribal regions and the government. Using the age old tactic of having a common enemy/opponent to unite the rest of the country behind. Of course, the military doesn't want a long term solution to that conflict, they want the conflict to go on forever as it is in their interest. The downside for us was that the Taliban gained enormous power and influence throughout the tribal regions in all that. They gained enough that they were a bigger challenge than the tribal regions themselves, as unlike the tribes the Taliban could hit back deep into Pakistan proper. Until the events of 9/11, the military(Musharaff at the time) handled this by having a pseudo alliance with the Taliban, basically allowing them to govern the tribal regions of Pakistan. After 9/11, American leadership decided they weren't comfortable with the Taliban by and large controlling large swathes of a nuclear armed state and maintaining an alliance with them of undetermined strength.

Of course, nobody in America is able to talk about it that way, because it would further strengthen the deeply anti-American sentiments in Pakistan already, maybe enough to tip the scales towards siding with the Taliban instead of America.

Example?

You want to see everyone get equal housing, so you threaten, cajole, bribe, extort and entice the government pawns to do your bidding. Have them put a gun to the head of banks (while assuring them it's not loaded) and order them to start giving bad housing loans to people whom it's known will not repay them. Promise the guilty they will never have to pay for creating these disasters, the reliable taxpayer will be there to clean up the mess.

Then when the house of cards collapses, you can always shrug off the blame to "greed", ignoring your role in creating unnatural, unstable opportunities...you're just a humble guy with good intentions who wanted the bums to all have their own mansions.

Soulpatch is on to something...if only he knew what...

>> ^rougy:

@bcglorf,
The problem I have with your point of view mainly rests on the presumption that the people who were defrauded "got what they deserved." I just don't see it that way. It's sort of justifying the bankers actions.
When somebody who is in a position of power and respect, as are most bankers and investors I would say, you can't blame John & Jane Doe for trusting in their advice.
The bankers and investors should have known better, and the vast majority of them did, but that didn't stop them from spreading the lies and conning people into signing their lives away.
P.S. - I hope Greece defaults. Something is rotten in Denmark when entire countries must go bust in order to satisfy Wall Street.


The people I figure were defrauded were the ones investing in the companies that were carrying terrible bad mortgages but calling themselves grade A safe investments. Those investors were defrauded and have very serious cause for concern as they were outright lied to by people wanting to profit off them.

As for the people buying homes at inflated prices, I would say they hold some blame and some plain old bad luck. The ones that took on mortgages they could only afford if the home increased in price I do blame pretty readily. They took a big risk, and risk were they were informed. They knew that they were betting on housing prices increasing. They knew the terms they were betting under and what it would mean if they won or lost the bet. They lost and should take the loss. The banks encouraging and focusing on those bets lost as many times over as they had customers lured in. The difference is the banks were pocketing more profit and got tax payer assistance to cushion their loss while the customers were left to deal on their own. I'd prefer both were left to deal with the consequences.

As for Greece, I've only scratched beneath the surface still, but it is looking like their debt problems run much deeper than just social services spending. I'm very curious were the real turning/tipping point in this was. If anyone has any good advice aside from the lead Rougy already threw out that'd be great. My current trail is the 40% of the Greek economy that was purely public sector jobs. That makes for a house of cards that's very vulnerable to government cut backs. My province(Manitoba) is in that very same boat and it is federal transfer funds from the federal government alone that is keeping us afloat.

I think part of the problem is that there's a whole lot of people out there who can't quantify how much wealthier the people feeding them the "Creating Jobs" stuff are. See: http://videosift.com/video/Most-Americans-Unaware-of-Growing-Concentration-of-Wealth at the 1:40 mark. Everyone thinks they are middle class that's a 29k avg neighborhood and 140k neighborhood, 3:30 repeats it again....they think the majority of Americans are middle class.

I'd venture to say that many people in that crowd are there, not because they understand that the people working on wall street dwarf their salary probably by a factor of 4 or 5 in the lower paid white collar jobs and up into the 100+ factors when they get into the upper positions. They are there because they want what they had back, and they can now see that Wall Street or at least the mentality of Wall Street has in a very short period of time affected many aspects of their lives.

If they could still afford a place to live, food, and have a decent job, they probably would have never noticed the long term erosion of the system by those with the money and power...twisting it so they took more of the pie and left the middle and lower class to figure out how they will afford their house (debt which in turn shifts more money up the ladder).

I mean most people who have jobs right now, the only information they care about on unemployment is when it comes from someone they know who they consider to be a "useful employee" and not their stoner brother, etc. And even then it's probably "These things happen, you'll find another job." until they are still unemployed 6 months later....maybe they were just lazy. 12 months rolls around and they are still unemployed? Now it starts to scare the living shit out of people, especially when another friend or family lost their job a month or two back. When it looks like it might affect them personally is when they care, and by that time it's been 1-2 years of people they know going unemployed at various times...working at McDs or Walmart because there's nothing out there.

http://videosift.com/video/Food-Speculation-Explained

Showing another way the Wall Street mentality is just giving us all a good screwing. Instead of these folks taking their talents to create something, they leech off of the people doing the work and drive up costs while creating massive uncertainty for everyone involved.

http://videosift.com/video/Elizabeth-Warren-The-Coming-Collapse-of-the-Middle-Class

Shows that people were experiencing bankruptcy more often that you would assume, but were able to hide it. Plus the general fixed costs being increasingly higher over the years with no overall salary gains to offset them.

http://videosift.com/video/Paul-Krugman-Income-Inequality-and-the-Middle-Class

Showing that they have been on the union bust kick for 30 years now at least, and it's something unique to the US because Canada in a similar global economy still has the level of unionized work force as the US had 30 years ago. Education has nothing to do with the income disparity. And the income disparity was fixed by policies put in place during the 1930s and early 40s. Which have been removed layer by layer since then, with increasing frequency in more recent history. And he points out in the video that the highest paid hedge fund manager makes more in a single year than 88000 NY teachers do in 3 years, my recounting of it might be off a little it's near the end of the video.


http://videosift.com/video/Multi-Millionaire-Rep-Says-He-Can-8482-t-Afford-A-Tax-Hike

Then you have this knucklehead talking about 200k to feed his family and how he can't afford a tax hike because it will prevent him from investing in store improvements and openings (that make him MORE money, so yeah..). Jon Stewart covered this in a much more funny way and how stupid the argument being made is. I'll re-iterate my take on this though. If they can't create jobs with the money they have coming in now after all the other tax deductions over the years, and all the opportunities before this day to do.....they will not do so. It's a fool's bet to depend on some guy who can't demonstrate how he has created jobs in the last 2-4 years in some meaningful way and how those low taxes make it possible to do so. Taxes would pretty much force him to reinvest in his business because if he tried to take it in profit he'd be paying a chunk of it out in taxes.




I think the most profane thing about this country right now is that people who want to work can't find work. And those who are working, especially blue collar jobs have a bunch of white collar guys speculating on their production....every thing that blue collar guy makes/produces probably has 10 or more white collar guys trying to make a buck off of it. It's like a house of cards, except the support structures are the very few people who still put out useable materials. It's crazy how something like that was let run wild, with more and more of the regulation taken away so they could stack even more cards onto the mess. The money isn't to be had in production, it's made in speculating/futures/etc...and it's just massively crazy to realize that all the middlemen are allowed to drive up the costs of oil/food/etc instead of cutting that shit out through regulation.

FEMA: "WTC 4, 5, and 6 are eight- and nine-story steel-framed office buildings, located on the north and east sides of the WTC Plaza, that were built circa 1970. ... Because of their close proximity to WTC 1 and WTC 2, all three buildings were subjected to severe debris impact damage when the towers collapsed. as well as the fires that developed from the debris. Most of WTC 4 collapsed when impacted by the exterior column debris from WTC 2; the remaining section had a complete burnout. WTC 5 and WTC 6 were impacted by exterior column debris from WTC I that caused large sections of localized collapse and subsequent fires spread throughout most of the buildings. All three buildings also were able to resist progressive collapse, in spite of the extensive local collapses that occurred."

So WTC 4, 5, and 6 behave like every other steel-framed building in history, but somehow WTC 7 collapses like a house of cards?

Observing the collapse of 47-story WTC 7 shows it to have all of the features of an implosion engineered by controlled demolition:

-The collapse of the main structure commences suddenly (several seconds after the penthouse falls).
-The building sinks in a precisely vertical manner into its footprint.
-Puffs of dust emerge from the building's facade early in the event.
-The collapse is total, producing a rubble pile only about three stories high.
-The main structure collapses totally in under 7 seconds, only about a second slower than it would take a brick dropped from the building's roof to reach the ground in a vacuum.

But NIST never tests for any explosive residue. Instead they spend 5+ years perfecting a computer model to blame the collapse on office fires.

And skeptics are the crazy ones? If you don't regurgitate government lies, then you're a conspiracy nut?

Go back to bed America.

Attacks don't bother me. I silently applaud them, as it tells me the other guy has exhausted any valid argument and can only toss peanuts from the gallery. Bravo. (golf clap)

Regardless... I have link after link to articles proving the central tenants of "Anthropogenic Global Warming" to be based on faulty data, bad models, or otherwise completely falsifications. Day after day the 'science' that served as the foundation of the Warmies argument is repeatedly falling into disrepute. It isn't settled science, as the Warmies try to make it out to be. It gives REAL scientists a bad name, to be frank, to be associated with such poor research.

This week's shining example? (There are new ones all the time, so this is hardly unusual...)

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=45447

All the reports on dying polar bears from global warming? Completely faked. This bozo (who got millions in federal grants BTW) 'peer reviewed' his so-called research with his WIFE. His data (ha) was 4 polar bear corpses he saw while flying around. He never examined the bodies. Now he is in total CYA mode, as the harsh glare of scrutiny comes to bear (no pun intended). Like most arguments that Warmies make, it falls apart when even BASIC, simple questions about methodology come up. The Warmie movement is a house of cards built on shoddy data, bad proceedures, and alarmist rhetoric. Like most scams of this sort, the perpetrators have very little recourse except to attack those who are trying to keep them honest. If everything is so cock-certain as the Warmies claim - then surely you have naught to fear from honest criticism of the data when it is well-founded?

@Truckchase

You and I agree, I think. I especially like what (I believe) your quote is getting at, which is that we need to understand our enemy. I don't think we do. If we did, then we'd never get mad at them, nor even frustrated like a teacher at students who aren't catching on to the easy stuff. We would understand where they were coming from and why they continue to oppose us. Anyone who still thinks that a logical argument is going to achieve anything is as ignorant in their beliefs as the faithers are. The fact that we have no idea how to bridge the intellectual gap shows we don't understand their motivations.

For example, let's say this rigorous fixation on creationism stems from the belief that not to accept the bible as the literal truth will result in their eternal damnation in hell. If that's the case, then telling them their bible is provably false isn't going to wash with them -- they're going to believe it anyway because they don't want to go to hell. If, on the other hand, we disprove that belief instead, the others will fall like a house of cards. Interestingly, accepting that that belief is not true doesn't result in damnation, by definition.

Those dominoes were folding like a house of cards!

I feel like I need a degree in economics to know which side is full of shit. Because one of them has to be.

I guess the real question is, at what point will inflation collapse the house of cards? Or can we have a 2% rate of inflation indefinitely?