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pluMmet

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pluMmet last won the day on March 20 2011

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  1. https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/we-demand-conviction-usa-president-barack-obama-and-trial-international-criminal-court-hague
  2. I have not sold this yet... I will be forced to go to a dealer to sell the Dinar if I don't get a response by end of business today. Thanks to the guy who did respond asking for a partial amount but I must be the whole thing. fyi c.o.d. is a fine way to buy as I don't do PayPal.
  3. Correction: 1.7 Million Dinar: 700,000 in 25,000 bills 1 million in 1,000 bills $1,550
  4. Of course doh! Uncirculated bought from Dinar Trade. I'm just outside of Boston for a direct transaction @ local bank. For elsewhere just email and we will talk about best methods.
  5. Selling Dinar to get my car fixed. 1.7 Million Dinar: 700,000 in 25,000 bills 1,000,000 in 10,000 bills $1,550 email 0adapa0@gmail.com if interested
  6. What I am saying is that I find it intollerable that I, in order to post in a forum like this have to put up with people like you! You and your few on this forum are like weeds that choke the flowers of real thought from every growing. You are so small minded that you can't even consider that of your many many shortcommings that not being able to understand that while denying a murder food might very well be justified... a person who commited an infraction of much lesser offense should by no means be denied food. What I am saying is that even though your numbers are few the rest who are not as stupid as you sit idly by and are yet too stupid to cast disperaging words at you in order to shut you up!
  7. It is my understading that in the USA the vasy majority of inmates are in for non-viloent crimes.... I recenlty heard that there are hundereds of people there for shoplifting 3 times (third strike) Many Fathers in jail for unpaid child support... It' easy to assume that these fellows are bums but in many cases the court demands extreamly unreasonable amounts from fathers and when unable to pay they go to jail. The FBI has been caught recently in that over 80% of their testomony on 'hair analysis' was fradulent and in tims past the same for their ballistics analysis. To lay a blanked over this and say they desirve this is a bit thick if you ask me! As far as the prision rep saying "these arent the sandwitches you are looking for, move along" without an actual invistigation why would anyone be so nieve as to believe this putz? Is somthing happening.. I don't know... I just wish I lived in a world were more people did not know instead of this BS world where it is so acceptable to just white wash it away as is so common (as I have just witnessed in this thread)
  8. [mediahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHAse7B-vOc[media] Inmates at the Lancaster County prison screaming for "HELP" and saying "THEY WON't FEED US". This was shot on May 24, 2015
  9. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-27/crony-capitalism-work-boeing-threatens-leave-us-if-ex-im-subsidy-yanked Crony Capitalism At Work - Boeing Threatens To Leave US If Ex-Im Subsidy YankedWhen has crony capitalism really gotten out of control? How about when a major U.S. corporation (a huge defense contractor, no less) is publicly threatening government officials to leave the country if the federal government doesn’t continue to boost their profits through government handouts: Boeing is stepping up pressure on opponents of the US Export-Import Bank with threats to shift manufacturing abroad if the agency that finances purchases by foreign customers is killed off next month. The threats come as a new push is being made in Congress to find ways of wresting reauthorisation of the bank from a committee controlled by one of the agency’s fiercest opponents. Scott Scherer, Boeing’s head of regulatory strategy at Boeing Capital, said the aerospace and defense group would “not sit idly by” if the ExIm Bank’s mandate was not renewed by the end of June. “Boeing is not going to let itself be hurt by the lack of an ExIm Bank,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times. “If it means sourcing … to other countries who will support us we may have to look at that. Other countries have more aggressive export policies. We will find an alternative.” First, let me state the obvious: This basically sounds like blackmail to me, and I don’t think lawmakers should look at this kind of behavior favorably. Second, it’s time for Boeing executives to understand that it’s not the role of the federal government to guarantee that they can sell as many planes as possible — they’ve benefited from the U.S.’s relatively free-market system; they should have to live with it. And finally, I don’t think Boeing’s threat is very credible. Will Boeing really pick up its factories and move abroad if Ex-Im isn’t reauthorized? Is the possibility other governments might subsidize it really worth the transition costs and the risks of losing billions in defense contracts? Thankfully, Jeb Hensarling, chairman of the House committee with jurisdiction over Ex-Im, called Boeing’s bluff: The Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee rejected reports that Boeing Co. or other companies might move production overseas if Congress doesn’t reauthorize the U.S. Export-Import bank. “I doubt I believe it,” Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas said at a Washington press conference Tuesday about whether failing to extend the bank’s charter would drive major corporations out of the U.S. “I think it’s frankly a bit of bluster.” Boeing, based in Chicago, might move some manufacturing overseas if Congress doesn’t extend the bank’s charter beyond June 30, the Financial Times reported May 17. It cited an interview with Scott Scherer, head of regulatory strategy at Boeing Capital. Hensarling said he and others who oppose reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank are trying to “lead the party in a new direction” that will give priority to free enterprise over individual business interests. Letting the Ex-Im Bank’s charter expire will go a long way to show that Republicans understand the difference between being pro-business and being pro-market — even if Boeing doesn’t.
  10. You just need well adjusted friends http://wakeup-world.com/2015/05/26/the-likely-cause-of-addiction-has-been-discovered-its-not-what-you-think/ If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: “Drugs. Duh.” It’s not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That’s what addiction means. One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments — ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself. The advert explains: “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.” But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then? In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what happened next was startling. The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did. At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was – at the same time as the Rat Park experiment – a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was “as common as chewing gum” among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended. But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers — according to the same study — simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn’t want the drug any more. Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you. It’s your cage. After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days — if anything can hook you, it’s that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can’t recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is — again — striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in my book.) When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be? This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told that it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don’t seem to make sense — unless you take account of this new approach. Here’s one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right – it’s the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them – then it’s obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit. But here’s the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected. If you still believe – as I used to – that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander’s theory, the picture falls into place. The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different. This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It’s how we get our satisfaction. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find — the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about ‘addiction’ altogether, and instead call it ‘bonding.’ A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn’t bond as fully with anything else. So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection. When I learned all this, I found it slowly persuading me, but I still couldn’t shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained to me — you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction, and none of the chemical hooks. I went to a Gamblers’ Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas (with the permission of everyone present, who knew I was there to observe) and they were as plainly addicted as the cocaine and heroin addicts I have known in my life. Yet there are no chemical hooks on a craps table. But still, surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer to this in quite precise terms, which I learned about in Richard DeGrandpre’s book The Cult of Pharmacology. Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in tobacco come from a drug inside it called nicotine. So when nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism — cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other filthy (and deadly) effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed. But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That’s not nothing. If the chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that’s still millions of lives ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about The Cause of Addiction lying with chemical hooks is, in fact, real, but only a minor part of a much bigger picture. This has huge implications for the one-hundred-year-old war on drugs. This massive war — which, as I saw, kills people from the malls of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool — is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people’s brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren’t the driver of addiction — if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction — then this makes no sense. Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction. For example, I went to a prison in Arizona — ‘Tent City’ — where inmates are detained in tiny stone isolation cages (‘The Hole’) for weeks and weeks on end to punish them for drug use. It is as close to a human recreation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats as I can imagine. And when those prisoners get out, they will be unemployable because of their criminal record — guaranteeing they with be cut off even more. I watched this playing out in the human stories I met across the world. There is an alternative. You can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts to reconnect with the world — and so leave behind their addictions. This isn’t theoretical. It is happening. I have seen it. Nearly fifteen years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them — to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step is to get them secure housing, and subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs. One example I learned about was a group of addicts who were given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other, and to the society, and responsible for each other’s care. The results of all this are now in. An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. I’ll repeat that: injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country’s top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass — and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal’s example. This isn’t only relevant to the addicts I love. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the twentieth century was E.M. Forster’s — “only connect”. But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the Internet. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live — constantly directing our gaze towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us. The writer George Monbiot has called this “the age of loneliness“. We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connections than ever before. Bruce Alexander — the creator of Rat Park — told me that for too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need now to talk about social recovery — how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation that is sinking on us like a thick fog. But this new evidence isn’t just a challenge to us politically. It doesn’t just force us to change our minds. It forces us to change our hearts. Loving an addict is really hard. When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like Intervention — tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won’t stop should be shunned. It’s the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives. But in fact, I learned, that will only deepen their addiction — and you may lose them altogether. I came home determined to tie the addicts in my life closer to me than ever — to let them know I love them unconditionally, whether they stop, or whether they can’t. When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me as I wiped his brow, we should have been singing love songs to them all along.
  11. For the record I think we have a couple fo robot posters in this forum... not joking Worst part is real people backing them up. http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/jennifer-o-connell-you-ll-be-sorry-when-the-robot-journalists-take-over-1.2219841 Jennifer O’Connell: You’ll be sorry when the robot journalists take over This year, computer software will produce more than a billion stories on the web. The majority will never be read, but in this era of McJournalism does anyone care? ‘Algorithms may be good at crunching numbers and putting them in some kind of context, but journalists are good at asking annoying questions.’ Photograph: Thinkstock Here’s a question to test your knowledge of Leaving Cert English: who wrote the following poem? Sing sweetly of battle-borne ages, Of fell foes infernal, and the king, whose woe endured hailing rage And the death of exiled heroes. Did you guess it was from Beowulf? Yeats? Or are you completely baffled? Here’s a tip: there’s no point rooting out your copy of Soundings. The answer is that nobody wrote it. Technically, it is the copyright of Nathan Matias, a PhD student at MIT. Creatively, however, it is the work of a predictive text programme, very like the one used by your smartphone. Matias is employing predictive text to write poetry for fun, but the idea of algorithm-generated content is deadly serious. If you consume much of your daily news diet online, you’re probably already acquainted with the work of “robot journalists”, you just don’t know it yet. We’re not talking here about Wall-E running around with a reporter’s notebook chasing stories on Amal Clooney (well, not yet), but about the algorithms used by organisations such as Forbes, AP and Fortune to produce millions of stories. AP relies on a content generation package called Wordsmith to produce some of its quarterly-earnings business stories and will soon be using it for sports coverage too. You’ve never heard of Wordsmith but you’re probably familiar with its work: it produced 300 million stories last year and is aiming for one billion this year. A rival company, Narrative Science, provides content to Forbes, Fortune and others. “We sort of flip the traditional content creation model on its head,” Robbie Allen, creator of Wordsmith told the New York Times. “Instead of one story with a million page views, we’ll have a million stories with one page view each.” The cheerleaders for this new technology – who includes some journalists (New York magazine declared that “the stories that today’s robots can write are, frankly, the kinds of stories that humans hate writing anyway”) – claim that it will free journalists up to do more meaningful pieces, while algorithms churn out rewrites of press releases, mine longer texts for insights, or produce entirely personalised packages of content tailored for individuals. That’s nonsense. As always, “freeing people up” invariably means “liberating them of their jobs”. But leaving aside the prospect of fewer people in employment, the notion that algorithms may end up taking over even the quotidian aspects of content production is depressing, and not just for journalists. Part of the problem is the phrase I’ve just used: content production. Old-fashioned expressions such as “journalism” and “writing” have given way to the more efficient, shinier “content production”. It’s a useful way of describing what multi-platform journalists do. But “content production” suggests something cheap and easily replicated, words that slide off a production line like McDonald’s burgers. Yeats, Hemingway or Behan weren’t “content producers” any more than your mobile phone’s predictive text software is a poet (although even that may now be up for debate). This isn’t just another whine from a journalist on the state of this troubled industry. Well, maybe it is. Journalists in every organisation are already under pressure to produce more for less. I was recently offered a freelance job writing content for a US-based website. Each piece would have taken most of a day and some travel to research, and a couple of hours to write. The pay was $50 per piece, expenses included. As the bottom continues to fall out of their pay packets, journalists will move on to other things. Graduates with communication skills, tenacity and a curiosity about the world, who might once have chosen journalism will, if they’re wise, pursue other careers. I know what I’ll be advising my children to do should they show an interest in my career path: find a different one. As a news consumer, you may not care whether the copy you read was produced by a robot in 0.01 of a second, or by a human in half a day (for $50), if it tells you what you need to know. You may not care that the humans in my industry are being replaced by robots – although yours could be next. But in the end, it’s you, the reader, who will suffer. Algorithms may be good at crunching numbers and putting them in some kind of context, but journalists are good at noticing things no one else has. They’re good at asking annoying questions. They’re nosy and persistent and willing to challenge authority to dig out a story. They’re good at provoking irritation, devastation, laughter or controversy. Wildly efficient robot journalists may offer hope to an industry beset by falling advertising rates and disappearing readers. The world will have fewer human journalists as a result, which may not be altogether a bad thing. But the question is: does it really need a billion more pieces of McJournalism? U2: not the worst of them It’s easy to be cynical about U2; they preach about global poverty, they avoid paying taxes in Ireland, they fall off bikes and stages, and Bono can seem pompous. But it was hard to be anything but swept away at the opening night of the US leg of the band’s Innocence and Experience tour, in San Jose last week. This is a group that still cares about what it does and knows how to get a room to its feet. The undoubted highlight was a down-tempo version of Sunday Bloody Sunday performed against a backdrop of images of victims of the Troubles. It was a strong and moving image whose resonance might have been lost on some of the audience – which, conversely, made it all the more powerful for those of us on whom it wasn’t lost.
  12. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-27/humiliated-mcdonalds-stop-reporting-monthly-sales Humiliated McDonalds To Stop Reporting Monthly Sales What do you do when month after month you have nothing but bad data to report, such as in this case McDonalds with its weekly comparable store sales shown on the ugly charts below? Simple: you have two choice - you either seasonally adjust the data (or in the case of US GDP, double-seasonally adjust it), or if that is not possible since unlike US GDP, your numbers are at least somewhat indicative of underlying reality, you stop reporting them altogether. That's what McDonalds just did. MCDONALD'S LAST REPORTING OF MONTHLY COMPS WILL BE FOR JUNE MCDONALD'S SAYS JUNE SAME-STORE SALES WILL BE REPORTED WITH 2Q From Bloomberg: McDonald’s Corp. plans to stop reporting monthly same-store sales results. The company will provide same-store sales for June with its second-quarter earnings report, then cease providing the data, Heidi Barker, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. And to think the new boss - who we hope did not promise the board anything about "transparency and accountability" - could have avoided all of this if, as we suggested, he had worn at least 37 piece of flair.
  13. If I were to say politician 'x' is corrupt look what they did and the response was 'they are all corrupt' that response is designed to stop the conversation... like wet blanket.
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