if you use an estimate for 2010 by the centrist to liberal Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, which pegs the share of all federal taxes for the top 1 percent at 22.7 percent.

America was founded on principles by John Locke. Those principles were that land should not only be owned by the rich. According to wikipedia Locke implies "He just implies that government would function to moderate the conflict between the unlimited accumulation of property and a more nearly equal distribution of wealth and does not say which principles that government should apply to solve this problem"

But actually I agree with you. If I tax the rich, they will buy fewer megayachts, (which would create jobs if U.S. regulation hadn't gutted the yacht-building industry here) and the government will just piss that tax money away on bombing Libya, or maybe homeland security irradiating pregnant women secret surface scan x-rays.

There is nothing left to say, you've just pegged it entirely. You totally rock

*promote

That's it, take that bitch down a few pegs.

I've always wondered if you would not just pop up in the middle of empty space if you time travelled without compensating for the fact that the earth is moving through at what like 1500 M/s through the solar system? And the solar system is orbiting the galactic centre. And the galaxy is moving away from all other galaxies (or vice-versa) as spacetime itself apparently expands. It all depends on how you think about frame of reference WRT your model of time-travel.

Like in Back to the Future, they travelled 30 years at a time. And they appeared to "portal/shunt" as opposed to "tunnel". It seems to me on a gut level like a portal or shunt would probably just dump you into empty space a fraction of a light year behind or ahead of the solar system if you jumped 30 years. A wormhole (Doctor Who or Bill and Ted style) is easier to imagine as being connected to the same "place" (according to what frame of reference I can't mentally peg down) in both times.

>> ^MichaelL:

This pretty much showed how JS is a hypocrite so blinkered by bias that he personifies the very evil he decries.

Let’s call a tiger a tiger. Cable news channels have two completely different facets. One facet is the “news” update – which is when channels are announcing stuff that happens – the cut and dry stuff. The other facet is “commentary”: biased, agenda driven, subjective, interpretive, talking-head bologna that preaches to a specific ideological crowd. Whether you want to admit it or not – ALL news channels have both of these facets of News and Commentary.

Now, the cable news channels have a lot higher “Commentary to News” ratio because they are filling up a 24/7 schedule. Fox is not unique in that regard – but shares the same market space as MSNBC & CNN - about 20% ‘News’ and 80% ‘Commentary’. Whether you like the commentary of a particular channel depends on your own bias. To people who are leftists (the majority of the Sift and JS) commentary on Fox News is like garlic to a vampire. To someone on the right (such as myself) commentary on MSNBC is like salt on road rash.

If Stewart was really a true “satirist” (as he likes to say he is) then he would be mocking all sides because they both have plenty of targets. However, 99 times out of 100, Stewart focuses on the side he ideologically opposes while ignoring juicy targets on the other side. A real satirist doesn’t handcuff himself like that, so what Stewart is doing is less ‘satire’ and more ‘biased commentary’ because what he selects as subject material is driven by his biases.

Stewart can’t admit that or his audience of smug, self-congratulatory neolibs would lose their self esteem. So when presented with ironclad proof that he is biased by Wallace, Stewart CANNOT bring himself to admit it. Instead he desperately cringes behind his typical dodge of being “comedy informed by an ideological background”. What a load of honk. You were nailed Stewart. Your claimed beef with Fox News (that they are somehow ‘unique’ in commentary bias) is proven demonstrably false. Instead, it was made crystal clear that you simply don’t like Fox’s brand of commentary because it ideologically opposes your own. Kind of hurts when you can’t just mack at the camera when you get pegged don’t it? You got visibly irritable and defensive because the truth hurts.

So in this interview Stewart couldn’t dive into the tall grass of his standard “Hey – I’m just a comedian! No fair! My clown-nose is on!” coward defense. The commentary of many news channels is liberally biased just as bad (or worse) than any of Fox News’ conservative commentary. Wallace proves it in black and white. In fact there are many studies that have proven this point routinely. But Stewart can’t bring himself to SAY that news outlets he shares an “informed ideological background” with are biased because that would mean that he would have to admit that he HIMSELF is biased. So in the face of all evidence he says that hack organizations like MSNBC are not biased but “trend toward sensationalism and laziness”. I haven’t heard a weaker, more pathetic rhetorical dodge in a long time.

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/993/who-knows-news-what-you-read-or-view-matters-but-not-your-politics

Of course Stewart doesn’t want to mention polls like this that prove that FOX patrons are about 2X as ‘informed’ as people on MSNBC, NBC, CNN, ABC, or CBC. He doesn’t want to talk about the fact that Couric’s audience is about as ‘informed’ as the average reader of the Inquirer. Of course Stewart isn’t going to admit that people who listen to LIMBAUGH are more informed than his audience. No – like Obama – Stewart only sticks to isolated, biased polls that favor his own personal world view - and ignores the evidence to the contrary. BIASED.

If you’re a fan of Stewart then bully for you. He can be entertaining sometimes, and he even has the occasional decency to admit (albeit sarcastically) his own problems – such as with the whole Weiner scandal. But those of you who are patting yourselves on the back pretending that he somehow ‘skunked’ Wallace are living in a self-insulated fanboi fantasy world.

Wallace made his point. Wallace never tried to say Fox News doesn’t have biased commentary on it. Wallace proved conclusively that other news channels – including Stewart’s own show – are primarily driven by biased commentary rather than news. To the world, Stewart proved that he cannot bring himself to simply admit that left-wing, neolib commentary is biased. Thus, proving to all that Stewart himself is an untrustworthy, intellectually hypocritical, biased tool. Game, set, and match to Wallace. Now Stewart can slink back to his show and lick his wounds by selectively re-editing reality so he doesn’t look quite as big of a tool – as is his wont.

No offense - but boo freaking hoo.

Through all history, art (and by extension, advertising) has idealized the human physical form to represent the societally desired standard of beauty. Some folks (vid chick especially) needs to spend a bit less time whingeing about things that are absolutely, unequivocally, 100% unchangeable. What are you going to do, toots? Pass a law that forces people to only portray human figures in a way that you personally approve? Get over it.

By the way, males get the same treatment too. Avertising, movies, TV, and pretty much all forms of media portray the male figure in an exaggerated fashion. Males are shown in two ways... 1. They are shaped like tent-pegs, tall, muscle-bound, and have physically impossible abs. 2. They are the icky "metro-sexual" waif-like douche with a shirt half open, popped collar, and an expression like he is about to commit suicide. So don't give me this bullcrap that men are not also objectified, idealized, cut up, and treated like meat in ads & the media. Of course they are.

But you don't hear stupid moronic men giving speeches about how it this trend 'damages' boys because it doesn't. Why? Because boys have the ability to not care squat about how the male body is portrayed in media. The only area men tend to be insecure about body image is (A) going bald and (B) the size of thier junk.

Never really pegged Harrison for a screamer.

Peg Bundy wants her outfit back.

It's hard to make a solid analysis of this video without knowing more about the context. I'm curious what the kid wrote, where they live, and what life the uncle has had. It looks like the uncle may have gone through some tough stuff and is proud that he got away from it. Seems like he is trying to keep the kid away from stuff he was once involved in.

I'd be pretty insulted too if I found my kid online talking trash about killing people running in gangs, it reflects poorly on the parents. I'm glad the guy is taking measures to prevent it. If the kid is so tough to go online talking his big game, you knock him down a peg. I don't think he'll be doing it again.

>> ^ChosenOne:

Square peg... round hole... ... its gotta fit!


Yup gotta fit...up that drivers' asshole.

Square peg... round hole... ... its gotta fit!

While the yuan is tentatively pegged to the dollar, it's hard to argue anything has changed.

A currency needs years, decades even to gain reserve currency status. With the current debt instability in the Euro area, this has become a very unlikely proposition. The yuan is even less likely, partly because currently it is still essentially pegged to the dollar and partly because it still far, far from being the pre-eminent power with massive income disparity comparing the cities to the countryside, unstable regions, and even purely festering structural issues like water shortage and pollution. What's more likely is it being replaced also in the medium to long term by the IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDR), basically an amalgamated currency with proportionate representations by major economic world power currencies.

The thing is though if the US were gradually replaced by other (or combination of) currencies it would be quite beneficial to the US economy.

The main effect would be a depreciation of the US dollar. The US dollar is in excessive demand because it is used in trade internationally, something that hurts US export competitiveness. A currency depreciation would make imports less competitive and exports more competitive. Less incentive to overconsume Chinese manufacturing, more incentive to export products thus improving the US trade balance and foreign debt.

Slight inflationary pressure. Currently deflation is a bigger worry, especially if it becomes entrenched as in Japan.

Public debt? Largely wouldn't be affected because it is predominantly denominated in US currency (Treasury bills) thus currency value does not play into the equation.

Point is, it's largely a good thing.

Took me awhile to notice that poor lil' pooch had a peg leg, lol

This was my first reaction as well. I started thinking about it differently recently however.

I've started thinking that Obama wants one thing as his legacy. He wants to knock China off the peg, and that's about it. He thinks doing so will matter more to the US economy long term than a trillion here, or a trillion there. The best way to do it is to follow a highly inflationary fiscal policy over the short term which, frankly, China can't afford to follow right now. Once I started thinking about his policies that way, more and more of them started making sense.

>> ^bmacs27:

If you've got me pegged as a creationist/ID proponent, you've got me pegged wrong. I specifically said, filling gaps in knowledge with divine intervention is obviously not valid. My point is simply that many who claim ID is unfalsifiable also claim irreducible complexity as impossible to demonstrate you might open evolution up to the same criticism. I don't really care what side I argue for, I'm just interested in hearing a hire level of debate. Frankly, I didn't want to talk about logical fallacies, I wanted to talk about biochemical processes, like opsin barrels, and energy barriers. That shit is dope.
Now, the real problem here is that what we mean by "evolution" is a moving target. It's so broad it's meaningless. In many ways "Darwinian evolution" has been falsified hundreds of times, much like Newtonian mechanics. It was wrong in the details. In fact, almost every rule I was ever taught at an elementary level about any sort of obviously falsifiable detail of evolution has turned out to be false in some weird or possibly limited case (e.g. epigenetics smells awfully Lamarckian). Still, we don't say "Darwin was wrong." You can't falsify evolution in the broad sense the same way you can't falsify gravity. At this point it's common sense more than science. It's more like a world view we use to form specific falsifiable theories than a theory itself. It's a world view that has been shown to be extraordinarily enlightening for sure. So much so, that at this point even with that Hippo fossil, I don't think people would change their minds.
That's fine. I just get worried about how far people push the assumption of natural selection (e.g. evolutionary psychology). I feel that there would more constructive arguments resulting from a healthy skepticism about it. I understand that there is a sociopolitical undertone to the whole debate, and I respect that. I just happen to think that those with the better arguments will win (natural selection). So often I see bullshit jive being put forth as reasoned debate, which I think is what happens when ideas gain too much popular acceptance. Thus, I'd like to see an elevated level of debate about the topic. Since you aren't going to get QM to form a coherent paragraph, I might as well be the uke.


Well, you may not remember, but not long ago "gravity" was thought not to exist. It took Galileo to prove without a doubt that it did. Same thing with "evolution": the concept was understood before Darwin (by, among others, Lamarck), but it took Darwin and his idea of natural selection to prove it (with Mendelian genetics being the Newtonian mechanics's analog). Newton said that two mass attract each other, and it still is true today only now we know that it is so because they each form a gravity well. In the same way Darwin said evolution happens by natural selection. I do not know how our understanding of the concept will change (or not, which is possible) in the future, but it will still be recognizable as being that the most fit (adapted) organism in a situation surviving and producing more offspring than the rest. What will change, I think, will be how we define fitness, organism, survival and reproduction. Already, the concept of "meme" shows how broadening some of the terms can lead to new understanding in the psychological realm. If you want to show that Darwin is wrong, then by all means attack natural selection and show us a better mechanism for evolution, the same way Einstein replaced Newtonian mechanics with general relativity. But really, I don't see how talking about biochemical processes will ever falsify natural selection. In fact, I don't even see how a flaw in natural selection could be revealed by some biochemical process: they seem to be on two different levels of abstraction. But if you know of one, then by all means enlighten us.