Payday loans EDB, in the United States: Fast-money strip-center locations have been popping-up all over in every city now like warts on a leper, for the past 25 years, operating in a regulatory blind spot. They loan you money at an exorbitant, unfair interest rate fully expecting and banking on the person loaned not being able to pay back the loan according to contract then penalize with fines when the debt can't be repaid. Criminal organizations have relied upon USURY as a means of extracting money from helpless or uneducated and desperate people for centuries. Mafia organizations the world over have relied on this practice since they began. I don't expect the federal government to do anything much different as much of their activity has been criminal for quite some time.

Inhumane, predatory, sick.

SO it looks perfectly reasonable at face value??I call bullshit when I see it before it happens usually... Cenk here sees it as a wonderful way to create revenue out of thin air by taking the model of the payday loan places that already exist over, not unlike a mafia organization takes over territory of another criminal's organization.

If you think I'm skeptical you are correct, if you think I am wrong that is your prerogative. If you choose to block my comments or 'ignore' them, I don't care at all-It simply proves the point I make continually here, that those who chose to place their hands over their ears, or their heads in a sand-bucket are minion, and the few dissenting opinions are met with torch and pitchfork, either because of the language used to do so is too caustic, or perhaps that the truths in my babble that are too horrible and painful to consider are much easier to deride and deny or to even consider, to damaged sensibilities combined with an ego the size of Asia.

I also consider that your stance on guns and gun ownership as equally skewed, as is much of your political rhetoric. But hey, there are a lot of folks here who think the way you do. I happen to be one of the other people.

And again, Cenk, yer a pompous git whose ego is also bloated beyond fat, and your smarmy, smug delivery makes me want to hack-up my lunch.

My complaint is the over fishing of the waters, not just in their areas, but in International waters as well. Everyone else has agreed to slow or stop certain types of fishing but the Japanese just walk in and scoop everything up , with a "more for us attitude."

And fishing / killing animals that were bread for food stocks is much different than killing wild animals en mass, intelligent or otherwise. Remember the Buffalo? I would be just as put off if Canadians, rounded up hundreds of Caribou into herds and outright slaughtered them as well, humanly, inhumanly or otherwise.

I believe the Japanese have not solved the "feed it's population" problem, because it relies to much on the over fishing of the oceans. They are having to travel further and further out to catch enough fish to feed their population. So, it's unfortunate, but a slowly spiraling population is not all bad in an over populated area that cannot sustain that population.

I love that they use so much from the sea, I love Japanese food. I just wish they would have a better consideration for the environment. The oceans, although filled with food, is not a viable and sustainable source for food in the long run. They can't even begin to monitor the ecological damage they are doing.

Back to the video at hand, I find it a bit hypocritical that the U.S. is criticizing the hunt. Yeah, dolphins are cute. The idea of someone killing one is probably uncomfortable to pretty much any culture that hasn't spent centuries eating them. But I think there's a bit of ethnocentricsm going on here.

How many cattle, chicken, and turkeys get slaughtered every day in the U.S. in the most horrible ways--nevermind the horrific conditions most have to endure from birth until death? Where's the international outcry over that?

The primary complaint of this video seems to be that the dolphins die slowly, but the video fails to mention that's only if the procedure is done wrong. It's done that way precisely because Japanese laws require the butchering to be done quickly and when done correctly they die within seconds. I imagine the whales killed by Inuit's in their traditional hunts don't die much quicker (see http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/20131008/save-whales-inuit-whalers-wary-whaling-commission-quotas for more details).

Basically, while I find the method they use to kill disturbingly inhumane, I also don't see the need for the international community to intervene in the hunt unless it can be shown that the hunt is adversely affecting the population. The primary reason hunting dolphins is stupid is because the meat contains alarmingly high concentrations of mercury which pose a major health risk to humans that habitually eat the meat.

An interesting response.

I hadn't realized that the life of black people in the South isn't universally known. It is such a stain on our history, such a cruel example of the Honors English theme of "man's inhumanity to man."

For me, that article wasn't about class warfare and voting rights. It was a portrait of fear overcome, and taught me some details about what it meant to be black in the deep South (you have to walk in A LINE when you meet a white person on the sidewalk???!!!)

Whenever I begin to think about this article, I start to tear up.

Which is interesting to me -- that that wasn't your take-away. Which means to me our shame isn't as internationally known as I thought. I think. Or maybe not. Whatever

@ messenger-The solution lies in a combination of radical reform of policy, and that can only happen if people stop following the programming of the people who pay for elections firstly. Then, you educate the hell out of people at a grass-roots level of just how deep the rabbit hole goes i.e., the insidious cabal of those who would profit from incarcerating more and more people to prop-up their money-making scam of larger and stronger law enforcement infrastructure, the inhumane prison industry which is billions of dollars annually. Profiteers who breed future criminals in prisons, and ghettos. It takes people actually giving a fuck about their society instead of thinking that they are safe ans secure with more police.

YOU ARE NOT

Police are made-up of dangerous, self-loathing and damaged individuals who are recruited for the sole purpose of building the infrastructure I described with protecting and serving very, very low on their not-so-hidden agenda.

The power-keepers and their fanatical putsch should be glaringly obvious to anyone with a TV, the internet, and an I.Q. above 100.

"They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."-Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac.

Heed the words of a brilliant statesman and thinker, and of similar, modern contemporaries.

I don't have much hope for it, I have expatriation written all over my forehead in big red letters. Hardly a place to go anymore, the entire world is jumping on board to the 'occupy everything with police and military' route.

Cops are criminals, plain and simple. Continue to believe to the contrary and watch how fast the shit gets non-linear.

"It follows allegations they charged the government for tagging people who were either dead or in jail."

So, private companies in charge of electronic tagging were engaged in highly unethical behaviour. Who could it be, who could it be... who would have the standing to get these kinds of contracts, while being ruthless enough to pull up such a fraudulent scheme? Oh, I know: fucking Serco and G4S again.

If you ever decide to put these wankers, including Atos, on a barge, tug it into the middle of the northern Atlantic and leave it there, give us a call. I'd row the distance if it meant the end of those bastions of inhumanity.

Excellent stuff, all around. It's nice to have a comprehensive overview over certain aspects of (y)our economic system instead of having to rely on piecemeal analysis by Baker, Stiglitz, Krugman, Galbraith, DeLong and the likes.

I watched the November issue last night and it made me appreciate even more that we still have a proper socialist party in our parliament, including a communist wing. They are still considered pariahs, yet their presence alone suffices to keep the other parties from following the British Tories' footsteps -- what a nasty bunch of inhumane wankers they continuously reveal themselves to be.

Yeah, never been to those inhumane dog races, but I still know what that is. It's an age old analogy.

Uhhh, now this phenom you imagine (enhance life for fellow man, yadda-yadda) has de-evolved into what we see worldwide: An unending fabrication of laws which restrict or inhibit the will of your fellow man in order to enable and strengthen the the will of a small percentage of human beings who use humanity to their own ends.

Comparing slavery in America to slavery of the bible is fucking ignorant. Never has there been slavery as cruel and inhumane and fueled by denial and lies than here. To compare U.S. slavery to that of the slaves in ancient Greece or Rome, both cultures whose slaves were an integral class in these cultures, is an historical faux pas of ludicrous proportions.

Here's an idea form another "troll" (As I'm often inaptly labeled by most shit-slingers) @ JustSaying & MilkmanDan: Humane sentiments for the inhumane, and a bit overly-forgiving of not only past atrocities and wholesale land-grabs avec/slavery both physical and economic, but their entrenched and continuing perpetration of the same....until we kill the mechanism by losing all the "nicey-nice" and start racking-up body-counts, the spectacle continues.
The empire will not stop until they have destroyed humanity-Annihilate them all, kick their poisonous bloodlines out of the gene pool, and sell all their shit at a discount!

Basically, what we are watching here, are international criminals at a circle-jerk, and common earthlings (we, the victims of their crimes) are expected to dutifully and respectfully stomach the ceremony without a cocktail.....of the Finnish, Molotov persuasion.

For people who have not had their hands dirty every year in a garden plot or larger operation for sustenance or other, you'd be hard-pressed to have much "imminent" fear of the future of food crops. One of the main reasons I seek to expatriate from the the U.S. has to do with availability of fresh, healthy, unadulterated foods that are not cost-prohibitive. The corporate food-barons of the planet are fucking you, and fucking you harder than you realize. They are plugging in dangerous data to your meat, and the meat of your offspring. It's an insidious form of slavery and eugenics with a human cost never before seen in earth's history one could imagine. Maybe, in some unrecorded pre-history we fucked the planet out of healthy food before but, I seriously doubt this....

Availability of the basics to life as a mammalian birthright is now being adjusted through engineering by douchebags, and we are all complicit.
Volcanic isles provide the best natural defense against humanity's inhumanity to man meaning, there is nothing that grows in that soil that is not good for you, or near a volcanic island that doesn't swim free-Factor-in chaotic-to-amazing weather, right-livelihood, and the absence of Americans, and you have my retirement plan.

I said yes to myself on both scenarios, but only because the 2nd is so outrageously unreal.

If I have the strength to push mass in front of a train so large that it might stop the train in its tracks....then its not really a person im pushing then, is it?

Problem solved, easy.

Second thoughts on the matter, if I have such strength, why not just jump down onto the tracks and stop the train myself? Would seem like a fairly easy feat in this fantasy world, where I have seeminly inhuman strength.

I'd be labelled a hero, and noone dies!

It's absolutely inhumane...to keep an ipad in such a hot car!

Sure, there is no need to speak in terms of civil war. Unless you're one of these guntoting, armed to the teeth nutjobs who think it would be a good idea. You know, the kind of people who buy an *assault rifle* for self defense.
However, no matter how well trained your riot police is, their less than lethal tactics are only useful up to a certain amount of people, they can become rather useless if the crowds get too big to contain or simply too violent themselves. That's when it gets interesting, that is when protest can turn into riots.
When the cops face huge, somewhat peacful crowds, they might enter Tiananmen Square. At what point would american cops or military personnel start thinking that it's unwise or inhuman to start firing into the crowd? Before the first shot? After the second magazine? On day three?
It's not the 1960s anymore but the sixties are not forgotten. Not by those who faced police officers willing to fire into the crowd. You know, black people. The kind of people whose parents and grandparents are still alive to tell them about their fight against oppression. This is still alive in the american concious, it shaped your country and it won't go away soon. Just ask Barak about his birth certificate.
Civil unrest is part of your recent history, the seed is there. Even under a President Stalin all you'd need go from isolated, contained riots to complete and irreversible shitstorm is a Martyr, a Neda Agha Soltan or a Treyvon Martin. No matter what ethnicity (although african american would be nice), that would present a tipping point.
Your police can bring out the tanks on Times Square if they want but if half of NY shows up, these guys inside the tanks might want to get out ASAP.
The Erich Honecker regime of the German Democratic Republic was basically brought down by somewhat peaceful demonstrations of people shouting "I'm mad as hell and I won't take it anymore" in east german accents.
The StaSi, the Ministry of State Security, who was efficient enough to make *every* citizen a potential informant in the eyes of their opposition, ran from the protesters like little girls. They used to imprison and torture people who spoke up.
The east german border used to be the most secure in the entire world. It was protected by minefields and guards who shot and killed anyone who tried to cross it. Before David Hasselhoff even had a chance to put on his illuminated leather jacket the government caved and just fucking opened it. People just strolled through Checkpoint Charlie and bought Bananas as if it was Christmas.
This was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. You know, the guys who lost over 20 Million people in WW2 and still kicked the Nazis in the nuts.
Nobody brought a gun. All the east germans had was shitty cars and lots of anger. They tore down not just a dictatorship, they tore down the iron curtain.
And they didn't even have a Nelson Mandela. Or Lech Walesa.
I still stand by my point: strength in numbers, not caliber.

Tywin is a cold, calculating magnificent bastard, and in the books that's really all he is.

One of the reasons I love this scene (and it's substantially different from the books, where Arya never meets Tywin) is that it humanises Tywin somewhat.

Some fiction likes to portray the bad guys as inhuman monsters, but in reality most people (even the very worst) are not like that. They came to where they are through a series of small steps, each more horrific than the last, but each justified in their own mind.

That, to me, is far scarier than the likes of Joffrey or the Mountain. Joffrey is just broken, and Ser Gregor is almost literally a monster. But Tywin made himself into what he is.

And that's the brilliance of this story. When you can feel sympathy for a character whose first significant act is to push a small boy out a window because he was saw him engaged in incest, you have a good writer.