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POPSEverybody will need paedophile checks.... Yet another example of new labour and the law of unintended consequences. Bring in a law with little thought to gain the headlines and spend the next decade living with the appalling consequences of mission and functional creep....
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POPSMIssouri "Truth Squads" Obama Police State This is the beginnings of a police state in Ameirca. First Missouri's freedom of speech falls even before Obama is even elected then what next should the worst happen and he becomes our president??
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POPS800,000 Americans Busted Annually for Pot
They argue the drug war “is doing far more harm than marijuana itself ever will,” because * it diverts hundreds of thousands of police agents from serious crimes “to the pursuit of harmless tokers”; * it costs taxpayers at minimum $10 billion a year to catch, prosecute, and incarcerate marijuana users and sellers; * it enables government to snatch the cars, money, computers and other properties of people caught up in drug raids even if they have had no charges filed against them; and * it allows “police agents at all levels to trample our Bill of Rights in their eagerness to nab pot consumers.” The drug war has also unleashed a torrent of racism in the form of unjust sentencing, which confines crack-cocaine users who are mostly black to prison for longer terms than powder snorters, who are mostly white. Hightower and Frazer say authorities have perverted the infamous “Patriot Act” of 2001 for use in non-terrorism cases, allowing “sneak-and-peak” search warra
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POPSMy Take on Google Wave Let me know if you are on Wave and if not let me know if you are interested. Should I get more invites I'll keep you in mind.
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POPSExploring the Sinister Catacombs of the City of Light Popularly called the catacombs, the Mines of Paris comprise tunnels running for literally hundreds of kilometers, spread over several levels in a maze of echoing mystery. Out of bounds to the public since 1955, for decades the cataphiles have claimed it as their own.
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POPSWashington cuts Wall Street's allowance But none of that stopped right-wing critics of Obama's alleged march to totalitarianism from piling on. "This is fascism," Rush Limbaugh burbled on his radio show. "They're still privately owned, but they're being run by who? Not even Obama, we're told. The freaking pay czar, who doesn't even have to tell Obama what he's doing. So he doesn't have to stop at the execs; he can limit the pay of the janitors. He can limit the pay of anybody he wants, and pretty soon it's gonna spread beyond companies that took TARP money." Fox News posted a lengthy article wondering whether Feinberg even had the legal power to set the pay caps, though there's broad agreement elsewhere that he does. "If bankers don't challenge this, if they supinely accept it out of fear of what the government will do if they do challenge ... then you have a nation of sheep," Fox's legal analyst, Andrew Napolitano, said.
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POPS NYTimes Declares Fox News Winner! After discussing past Presidents who unsuccessfully fought the press, Carr first scolded the White House, and then declared an unpredictable winner: Even though almost all the critiques contained a kernel of truth, in each instance the folks who had the barrels of ink, and now pixels, seemed to come out ahead. So far, the only winner in this latest dispute seems to be Fox News. Ratings are up 20 percent this year, and the network basked for a week in the antagonism of a sitting president... he administration, by deploying official resources against a troublesome media organization, seems to have brought a knife to a gunfight. Carr seemed even less impressed with the tactics the Adminstration has been employing in this battle: On the official White House Web site, a blog called Reality Check provides a running tally of transgressions by Fox News. It ends with this: "For even more Fox lies, check out the latest ‘Truth-O-Meter' . . .
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POPSGlenn Beck's '9-12' Logo based on Communist and Socialist designs More: Turnout for the 9-12 Project's Saturday march on Washington was a bust; 30,000 protesters signed up in advance (MSNBC reporter David Shuster tweeted that D.C. park police called that figure "generous"). But even if three times that many actually showed up, the number would fall far short of the hundreds of thousands (and even millions) claimed to be planning to attend. Even in that reduced crowd, however, surely someone recognized how odd the right-wing gathering's left-wing logo was. Maybe Beck will explain. Sort of.
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POPSWall Street Derivatives: So complex as to be "Computationall intractable" MORE: In principle, an alert buyer can detect tampering even if he doesn't know which asset classes are the lemons: he simply examines all 1000 CDOs and looks for a suspicious overrepresentation of some of the asset classes in some of the CDOs. What Arora et al. show is that is an NP-complete problem ("densest subgraph"). This problem is believed to be computationally intractable; thus, even the most alert buyer can't have enough computational power to do the analysis. Arora et al. show it's even worse than that: even after the buyer has lost a lot of money (because enough mortgages defaulted to devalue his "senior tranche"), he can't prove that that tampering occurred: he can't prove that the distribution of lemons wasn't random. This makes it hard to get recourse in court; it also makes it hard to regulate CDOs. Everyone on Wall Street... UP AGAINST THE WALL, THE LOT OF YOU BASTARDS!
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POPSRussia: We'll Nuke 'Aggressors' First Uhhhh....Mr. Obama, will you please reconsider the missile defense shield???!! Isn't your FIRST duty to protect US citizens and secondly, our allies? Or do you consider us to have any?