That's better than American Horror Story right there.

FX is a channel. Fox is another channel. The two play very different programming. American Horror Story versus Glee, So You Think You Can Dance, etc. FX is the show's home station.

Fairly? Media Research Center is pointing out liberal bias, aka plain old intellectual dishonesty.

In 2008, high gas prices were an easy way to blame Bush. The shills wouldn't DARE do it to the guy their one-sided reporting helped elect and covers for now.

Liberal "journalism" = agenda first, facts, distorted or not at all.

>> ^messenger:

Have you read those articles? They're not written fairly. They say things like, "[In 2008,] On gasoline specifically, reporters have routinely showed photos of extreme pump prices despite lower national averages." For that to be meaningful and show a media bias, it would have to be true that in 2012 reporters are NOT routinely showing photos of extreme pump prices, which of course they are, because it still makes a better photo to accompany the story. This is biased journalism.
Also, choosing the peak month of gas price reporting in 2008 and comparing it only with the most recent month of reporting isn't a fair comparison.
Finally, in 2008, it was a bigger story because price spikes were a relatively new thing, and it was still easy to scare people with horror stories of the world collapsing. But now we're used to them, and we know they drop off after a month or few, so it's just not as attractive to journalists any more.
In other words, those numbers may be accurate, but they don't represent that that article says they represent. Same goes for the handful of other articles I read there. They were all written with their agenda first, facts second, just like how Santorum selectively chooses his facts about College reducing faith.>> ^quantumushroom:
...here's all the liberal "news" bias you can eat.

Have you read those articles? They're not written fairly. They say things like, "[In 2008,] On gasoline specifically, reporters have routinely showed photos of extreme pump prices despite lower national averages." For that to be meaningful and show a media bias, it would have to be true that in 2012 reporters are NOT routinely showing photos of extreme pump prices, which of course they are, because it still makes a better photo to accompany the story. This is biased journalism.

Also, choosing the peak month of gas price reporting in 2008 and comparing it only with the most recent month of reporting isn't a fair comparison.

Finally, in 2008, it was a bigger story because price spikes were a relatively new thing, and it was still easy to scare people with horror stories of the world collapsing. But now we're used to them, and we know they drop off after a month or few, so it's just not as attractive to journalists any more.

In other words, those numbers may be accurate, but they don't represent that that article says they represent. Same goes for the handful of other articles I read there. They were all written with their agenda first, facts second, just like how Santorum selectively chooses his facts about College reducing faith.>> ^quantumushroom:

...here's all the liberal "news" bias you can eat.

I had mine out when I was 26. Novacaine, Lidocaine or Whatevercaine only. As soon as the freezing wore off enough that I stopped drooling and could wrap my lips around the edge of a glass I was in the pub having a few beers. After all the horror stories I've heard I guess I was just lucky. And since everyone expected me to take a couple of days off work I was happy to oblige them.

I grew up in Finland and went to school there. Yes, some kids were bullied and none of the teachers ever noticed some of that. It didn't happen in the school, but when I was on the second grade n(elementary school), I definitely had two biys bullying me for a while. After school ended and we had to walk home, they'd follow me, push me around, scare the crap out of me. I was the only child and very quiet, timid, easy to scare.

Those boys really scared me, I remember just running off and grabbing the arm of a woman walking home from the store, to make the boys think I knew her. It eventually got bad enough that I just refused to go to school. My mom didn't understand what was going on, and she threw a frigging fit that scared me even more. But still, I refused to go to school.

Eventually it all came out. I eventually talked to my parents, and my mom came to observe this after one schoolday. She grabbed the kids when they started attacking me and scared the crap out of at least one of them. He was nice after that, he just said 'please don't tell my parents, I didn't know I was really scaring her!" My dad went to talk to the other bullys parents on one night, and they had no idea he was doing that. My parents had a talk with my teacher too. I was left alone after that (and luckily thye worse kid actually moved away before too long). It wasn't anything too bad, but at that time, it was awful. Some kids maybe just not realize what they are doing. And the parents really had no idea.

Teaching kids bullying is bad should really start at a young age. You have to make them realize what they nare doing is wrong, and how wrong it can be.

On junior high we had a girl who me and my friends made fun of. We thought it was just a 'fun' thing to make comments about her hairdo, or things like that. We were still 'friends' with her, but I bet she hated us. I myself never realized that little comments like 'your hair looks like a sausage roll', even when made in a 'friendly way' hurt her.

I didn't even realize that until I was way older! If I could go back in time, I'd never make those comments! We all thought we were just being funny, but little things like that can also hurt. I am not sure how one could deal with things like that, but we all should just be taught that little things can hurt. It doesn't have to be pushing and hurting, it can be just silly little remarks, and I know I will feel bad about all that for the rest of my life!

Bullying of even that kind usually stopped (mostly) after people graduated from Junior high, and went to either highschool, or vocational school. I went to highschool, so I have no idea how life in a Finnish vocational school is (we were told horror stories though, that vocational school woulod be really bad and everybody was being bullied to death, but I think it wasn't true, or at least not today).

To me watching American TV shows about high schools, and seeing kids bullying, being bullied and so on, was awful. To me, high school was a whole different planet. Kids were trying to be nice, or at least more adult-like, and bullying wasn't there. At least according to the TV shows, High school is bullying heaven! And all about cliques! Maybe because we really didn't have jocks or cheerleaders, it was better? No drama clubs, glee clubs.. You might have bene classified as a 'nerd', or a 'good girl', but at least not too many peoiple were outcasts in my school. And if they were, it was because of their personality, not because of what they wore or were interested in.

It really breaks my heart to know kids are bullied so bad they feel like the only way out is to kill themselves.

People will need to care more, to put themselves in anothers' shoes. When you are a kid, it can be hard. But I think it should start from the home, and schools should try to do whatever they can. People just need to understand how it feels, and how you'd feel if somebody did that to you, or to your loved one.

Excuse the rant, my dog has gotten me up at wee hours (around 4:30am, though this morning she graciously let me sleep until 5:15am) every night for quite a while and I am seriously lacking sleep and can be emotional and/or weirdy irritated and grumpy, not to mention insane.

What has honestly changed though in say 40 years ? is it statistical that people on the side of the road will rob you or harm you ?

I do not understand how there is an influx of this behavior, if so what is it based on ? the population growth ? crime rate going up ? the internet and television plastering horror stories over the waves ? I do not get how lately everyone has this mentality that "if they stop they will be killed "

I blame the media.

>> ^jimnms:


Probably caller ID. Did DHL really call you about a delivery or are you pulling my leg? I've had horrible service from DHL. I'm lucky if they bother to stop and bring a package to my door, they usually just drive by and toss it out. Ok, that's an exaggeration, but the last two times they delivered something to me, they didn't bring it to my door, they left it at the bottom of the steps and took off. One time it was a notebook, and it was pouring down rain. I stayed home to wait for the delivery because it was supposed to require a signature.


They called, although it was because my package was in customs and they needed to send me a bill for VAT to be paid before they can deliver. And delivery was fine, straight to my workplace. I've heard the horror stories, though.

I've heard some horror stories about this one. This looks like a huge step backwards. Dear Avid, it looks like your competition gave up.

Well, if you know all these videos of excessive police force, I understand why he doesnt want to turn around, put his hands on his head and get on his knees. I am German and if an police officer here would ask that of me and I didnt even know what I was doing wrong, I would refuse aswell and wanted to know what for first because I would fear to have some rampage guy in front of me.

Sorry, but the reputation of the police (not only in the USA, also here in Germany and Europe) goes down every day. Especially in your semi-police state after 9-11 I understand such an reaction completely - at least if youre not some kind of sheep.
I know more than enough horror stories of cops abusing their power and have experienced many myself.

>> ^peggedbea:

When my son was born I was a radiology tech in a hospital. I was not for circumcision, I thought it seemed totally unnecessary. Then I got bombarded with horror stories from all the nurses I worked with and actually ended up having to do a procedure on a little boy whos foreskin looked like it had NEVER EVER been cleaned. It was 1. the only foreskin I'd ever seen and 2. totally traumatic. In the end my sons father INSISTED he have it done, and I was a little too fucked up from having just given birth to argue anyway. So the doc gave my son a chocolate dum dum and stuck that little plastic bell thing on his penis. He was maybe 3 hours old. He didn't cry, or even seem to care. The foreskin fell a few days later.
If I ever have another kid, I won't circumcise him. But I don't feel like a horrible person because I let my son get circumcised. I used to watch a lot of things about female circumcision, the mother's who do this to their daughters think they're doing the right thing. Because in that culture, no one will want her if she isn't cut. In that culture, women don't generally get to lead lives without men. In the end, I don't begrudge parents too much for wanting to raise children who will be accepted in their respective societies.
Yeah, I get it, it's altering someones body without their consent. But individual parents aren't horrific monsters for doing things within in their respective cultural norms. It's the cultures that are fucked up and wrong. And it's complete ignorance that lets these practices continue, not malice.


You are absolutely right about ignorance and tradition being at the core of the problem, and your story illustrates my point about community pressure. (Far from me the will to guilt-trip you, Ryjkyj or anyone else for circumcision(s) already performed, in optimal circumstances. Preventing future occurrences and raising awareness on the issue is the idea here.)

There is quite a big difference between the constraints of tribal culture in the deserts of Sudan and those of Americans, between "civilised" societies and those living in bronze age cultures. For one, we are (or at least can be) aware of such notions as "rights of the individual" and the like. Secondly, HYGIENE. @Kofi summed it up neatly, and your story adds to the illustration. Parents who "NEVER EVER" clean their child's weewee are guilty of child abuse (in the form of neglect), and should be regarded with horror and disdain, in an age when access to information has never been easier. That bronze age desert-dwellers with no running water would practice circumcision makes some sense, but that it be culturally accepted elsewhere is untenable.

FGM enrages and disgusts me far more than circumcision, and I argue strongly against the cultural relativism and cowardice (vis-à-vis Islam) which allows it to go one in "civilised" countries, while supporting its eradication worldwide. Male circumcision is a far lesser evil, but the one should not be used to dismiss/excuse the other.

When my son was born I was a radiology tech in a hospital. I was not for circumcision, I thought it seemed totally unnecessary. Then I got bombarded with horror stories from all the nurses I worked with and actually ended up having to do a procedure on a little boy whos foreskin looked like it had NEVER EVER been cleaned. It was 1. the only foreskin I'd ever seen and 2. totally traumatic. In the end my sons father INSISTED he have it done, and I was a little too fucked up from having just given birth to argue anyway. So the doc gave my son a chocolate dum dum and stuck that little plastic bell thing on his penis. He was maybe 3 hours old. He didn't cry, or even seem to care. The foreskin fell a few days later.

If I ever have another kid, I won't circumcise him. But I don't feel like a horrible person because I let my son get circumcised. I used to watch a lot of things about female circumcision, the mother's who do this to their daughters think they're doing the right thing. Because in that culture, no one will want her if she isn't cut. In that culture, women don't generally get to lead lives without men. In the end, I don't begrudge parents too much for wanting to raise children who will be accepted in their respective societies.

Yeah, I get it, it's altering someones body without their consent. But individual parents aren't horrific monsters for doing things within in their respective cultural norms. It's the cultures that are fucked up and wrong. And it's complete ignorance that lets these practices continue, not malice.

they are absolutely prime fodder for destructive ideologies.

but i've seen mentally ill atheists take after their bosses with machetes after watching too much anime. i've seen mentally atheists flip out while watching eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.

like at @GenjiKilpatrick said, it usually takes a catalyst for mental illness to turn into violence. but that catalyst doesn't HAVE to be religion. and in the absence of religion something else takes its place.

religions aren't something invented out of thin air. they have existed in every culture i can think of. most of them are really really similar. in the more ancient ones you can trace their dogma to serving an actual purpose benefiting human survival in the region (see cow worshipping hindis, or desert dwelling religions abstinence from pork). they obviously serve a purpose. and they change and evolve over time.

of the billions and billions of devout people throughout time how many of them have brutally slaughtered their children? i know you can list several. but thats out of BILLIONS. i'm not seeking to diminish the atrocities committed in the name of religion. i'm saying correlation does not = causation.

i'll wager my paycheck that there were warning signs leading up to this event. and i'll also wager my paycheck that the people who saw the warning signs were uneducated (about mental disorders) and i'll equipped and scared. declaring religion the cause of these kinds of horror stories doesn't lend itself to prevention very well. perhaps we need to take a better look at our mental health apparatus and not-nearly-adequate outreach, education and support system.

one thing i do think churches could do (and i know many churches that have) is adopt church counseling programs.. staffed by actual trained psychologists and counselors, not seminary graduates. to treat their members and give families an accessible, trusted place to turn to when they start seeing some destructive warning signs.

>> ^Deano:

>> ^campionidelmondo:
Crazy people often do more violent things than eat skittles. I don't see the connection between her crazy actions and religion. Linking this to religion is just like linking school shootings to violent video games. No, nothing that's being mass consumed drove this person from being the nice neighbour to slaughtering people. Stop looking for the fault in the things you don't like and accept the fact that some people are just crazy.

Of course there are connections. Just look at Islam. Christianity isn't as bad but people kill and maim others based on their reading of the Bible.
There's always the "just crazy" view. And I accept that to an extent. But I suspect people like that are prime fodder for destructive ideologies and supernatural thinking.
And she had access to a well established cult that served to radicalise her to a point where her family were no longer physically safe.

Why is it extreme fiction to think that powerful, ambitious men would take advantage of a power vacuum? Free market intervention via the IMF has horror stories far, far worse than this. Real stories, not fiction. Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, Bolivia. Powerful people take advantage of the power vacuum in our country too. Deregulation of derivatives caused the current financial crisis. Deregulating the banks caused the mortgage fraud crisis. Deregulating energy caused the Enron crisis. Business has co-opted our relatively powerful government and led us into war and debt. Take away government and the hard fought laws of the last few centuries and the power of wealthy ambitious men would be unbound. Take away government and the hard fought laws of the last few centuries and what you consider to be oppression would be dwarfed.

When states fail, gangs and warlords always immediately rise up to take advantage of the system.

When I say anarchists and conservative libertarians are naive, I'm not trying to be mean. I think they are blind to the historical constant that powerful, ambitious men will always try and game political systems, and that anarchism, by design, would be completely impotent at stopping them. It is no small coincidence that these powerful, ambitious men support many of the institutions and think tanks that inform your politics. The same people that fund Cato and the Reason Institute also fund PNAC and Freedomworks. Does it not disturb you that Neo-Cons fund your institutions? Does it not disturb you that conservative libertarian heroes like Milton Friedman have backed violence and violent dictators in South America to further their cause? To further your cause?

Anyway, this is why I find conservative libertarianism and anarchism so objectionable. I don't think anarchism could ever happen, because of the paradox that in order to achieve and maintain an anti-state, you would need the power of a state. The reason I oppose a movement that could never get off the ground is that its principles (low taxes, deregulation) are being used as justification for the very tyranny it seeks to abolish.

(PS: check out the documentary: GASLAND. My fiction was based on real events.)

I am not disagreeing with you. The video shows 1 guy being scanned before she was lined up to go through and refused. I think she was behind the blocks arguing with them at the start of the video or close enough to the start. We can say she was just in her own little world and didn't care that other people were being picked as long as she wasn't, which is a pretty common trait in all things lately.

She's young and she might even be on the coddled side. But I've personally seen women and especially "enforcement" women being harder on other women than anyone else in the vicinity, especially if the women are roughly the same age or a few years younger. It looked to me that the girl with her hair pulled back was demonstrating this, she seemed more agitated than any other person there aside from the girl being surrounded by however many people "against" her.

It doesn't even have to be her being attractive or not, but to me the whole thing seemed off. They can tell her scan or pat down or she needs to leave. If they thought she was trying to smuggle something onto a plane roping her off a few feet away from other passengers is doing nothing to contain the situation. It's an attraction, if you don't comply we'll rope you off and try to embarrass you and yammer at you instead of making our point and expelling you from the airport. Again if she was that much of a nuisance, they could no-fly list her. The video tape release being split and non-time stamped doesn't exactly eliminate all of my doubts. That they screen more often than the girl noticed (after she had already balked) is apparent, but no idea if they were doing this prior to the the beginning of the situation...one guy was scanned at the beginning. I'll say that for professionals to not be consistent would be doubtful, but professionals wouldn't consider a roped off area sufficient either or showing emotion toward a possible threat.

Most people being surrounded by a lot of unfriendly people after a disagreement would have a different perception than an onlooking, especially if they are young and sheltered. I think it was a lot of over-reaction on both sides part, except the TSA is supposed to a free pass because she might be packing a bomb as underwear......yet they leave her around the rest of the public and in the airport for 20+ minutes as shown in the video instead of isolating or removing.

>> ^nanrod:

You make some good points but I have to disagree with your conclusions. All the missing video in the world won't entirely validate her story. Why? Because the video we do see clearly contradicts her story. One of her main claims was that she was singled out ostensibly because she was a "hot chick". In the 13 minutes of footage where we see her in the screening area I counted 21 people going through of whom 12 were scanned. She certainly wasn't singled out period and while each to his own I didn't see her as being the "hot chick" in the group. She also stated that she was screamed at. What I saw was TSA staff who appeared to be speaking relatively calmly with her including a woman who appeared to be senior personnel who was handing her paper towels to dry her eyes. While at some times some of them looked annoyed with her I didn't see any evidence of screaming.
Bottom line; she was selected for scanning, was uncomfortable with that so had to go for more intensive pat down. She had heard horror stories of breasts being twisted painfully and was concerned about that and asked questions. Whether or not she got satisfactory answers she must have ultimately refused the pat down. No pat down , no scan, no fly. Now was she mistreated at any point along the way? Your absolutely right that without audio and any missing video we'll never know.>> ^Porksandwich:
>> ^ReverendTed:
Politics aside, what's the verdict now that we've seen the raw security camera video?

She said there were a dozen cops that showed up, that she was cuffed to a chair and that they ripped up the ticket. And I think she said it took an hour at least. That's only 12 minutes or so of video in one section and 10 in another. So I am not sure if that's the entirety of the video or if they bring her back to the chair when the cops show up..or take her to another section at that point.
The camera angles kinda suck.
The second video which is hard to tell how far apart they are...shows her with 3-4 people in white shirts who appear to have sheriff/police badges on their arms. Which holds with her story. It is extremely hard to tell what is going on in these videos, she's kind of hard to see with everyone being taller than her.
So I think there's about 10-20 minutes of missing video showing the cops arriving. And that could entirely validate her story.

A few things are clear, she was crying, one of the TSA agents was clearly angry at her, and the police did escort her out of the airport. Not enough video to disprove her story, but enough to make it look like she lied if you assume these two videos have nothing in between them.
At this point I side with the McLain because I think they are withholding portions of the video. And I would think video like this would have time stamps....being security footage and all.