I would have been happy if anyone thought of putting double doors on the paddocks or at least a 2 stage verification system to open them up. Having a single door with a single verification panel on the containment cells was just asking for trouble.

Forget about ultra-smart dinos tricking the handlers or stupid zoo employees opening the doors, with such a simple locking mechanism in place at some point some animal rights activist was sure to let them out of their pens.

The Nazi/Soros things comes from an interview he did with 60 minutes where he talks about pretending to be the godson of a Christian neighbor whose job it was to confiscate Jewish citizens property. He called it the point of his life where his character was set and talks about how he feels no guilt because someone had to confiscate the property and why not him. Honestly, it sounds like the testimony of a sociopath.

His crashing the British pound in the early 90's seems very much in that same character.

Renewable energy in the US is already subsidized at more than double the amount of oil and gas. Green does not mean cheap.

Renewable energy already receives more than double the subsidies received by oil and gas.

According to the CBO $3.7 billion for oil and gas vs $9 billion for renewable energy. This includes both direct subsidies and other federal investments.

Any other questions you don't really want to know the answers to?

In fact according to the CBO, renewable energy receives quite a lot more in federal subsidies than oil and gas: $3.2 billion for oil and gas (+ $500 million in non-subsidy expenditures) compared to $7.3 billion for renewables (+ $1.7 billion in non-subsidy expenditures).

There are other general subsidies they both take part in but those are not specific to their industries and are just the normal accounting tricks most manufacturing industries use to spread out their costs over time.

Reading doesn't appear to be your strong suit.

From the CBO, as I stated, the US subsidizes Oil and Gas approximately $3.2 billion/year (of course that will be higher or lower any given year) and an additional $500 million in more direct funding. Most other subsidies are generic and available to all industries. Nothing in the Guardian link goes against that.

A lot of the "subsidies" the anti-fossil fuels sites use to bump up their numbers are actually just standard business practices used by everyone to spread costs over years. It's like patent trolling where they just add "claimed by the fossil fuel industry" instead of "on the internet" to the end of standard tax right offs to claim it's a special subsidy received by oil companies.

That's not to say there aren't some oil/gas specific subsidies but according to the CBO that number is approximately $3.2 billion/year (not 50 like you link claims). Compare that to the $7.3 billion renewables receive. Renewables also receive and extra 1.7+ billion in other government expenditures vs $500 million for fossil fuels.

Not to be too picky but part of a prosecutors job is to only prosecute case they know they can win. If a prosecutor does not believe they have the evidence to successfully convict someone they aren't suppose to charge them just to make other people feel good. In fact, prosecutors can be brought up on charges themselves for going after defendants they didn't in good faith believe they could convict even if they knew they were guilty.

Now, there are some that take that too far and only go after slam dunk cases, but in general most prosecutors will bring cases to trial where the odds of conviction are lower than 1:1. For some that might mean they go after anyone they think they have a 75% chance of convicting, some may be 60% and for some 50% might be good enough.

Real life isn't like a Law and Order episode where they try people with no real evidence hoping they'll confess on the stand and if they don't just move on to the next case.

That's true to a point. The monies directly seized by the Feds go into a single pool that they have complete control over (it is not regulated by congress) but the various federal agencies often partner up with state or local agencies and when doing so offer them a cut of the take.

1 stat from 2012 had just the IRS seizures in the neighborhood of 640 cases (almost 6 times the amount from just 7 years before) with less than 20% even resulting in charges being filed.

Due to the length of time it takes to process a claim against the government to get your money back and the sums involved (usually in the ballpark of $40k) most people take the standard offer of 50% and go home. Even when the victims win in court or the government just gives in, they have been known to skip out on paying the court costs, back interest and other expenses to the victim like they are legally required to.

This was a letter written to the lawyers of Lyndon McLennan from the U.S Attorney after theiy seized his life savings and he went public:

Whoever made [the case documents] public may serve their own interest but will not help this particular case. Your client needs to resolve this or litigate it. But publicity about it doesn’t help. It just ratchets up feelings in the agency. My offer is to return 50% of the money. The offer is good until March 30th COB.

He didn't settle and the case was later dropped and his money returned but none of his expenses were covered.

The Clinton Foundation spends a paltry amount on actual charitable works; in fact they spend as much on office supplies as charity. The vast majority of money is spent on paying Clintonites salaries during times they can't be paid by other official means (see Sidney Blumenthal) as well as paying for first class airfare and hotels for the Clintons and their friends.

There is a reason most charity watchdog groups refuse to classify the Clinton Foundation as a charity.

Any crime he may or may not have committed when he had contact with the 'victim' has had it's statute of limitations run out years ago.

The only actual possible crime here would be blackmail and in that case Hastert would be the victim not the perpetrator and since he's not pressing charges even that wouldn't be prosecutable.

These aren't cases of government screwing up, the government is behaving just how it wants to behave.

Money confiscated through these programs go directly to the branch that confiscates it so even in cases where cash deposits are perfectly reasonable many agencies go with the "take first, question never" approach.

Why bother filling out paperwork that Aunt Mae's Cupcake Emporium was just depositing the cash on hand at the end of the week when you can instead confiscate all of Aunt Mae's bank accounts and spend it buying whatever the hell you want for the office (the list of purchases with this type of confiscated cash is ridiculous since it doesn't have to follow regular budgetary processes). There are cases where government agencies seized money they knew 100% was legal and literally using it to throw themselves a party (including buying margaritas machines).

He was the winning entry in the SPD's 'hackathon' to produce a video redaction system to meet their needs (his request for video was also the main reason for having the hackathon in the first place buts that's not important).

He pretty much meets the definition of hobbyist hacker from Wikipedia or the #3 definition of hacker from webster "an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer".

If you read the article you'd see that there are 3 possible versions of police video. #1 always exists, #2 will exist in most cases (when fully implemented) and #3 is only created upon request.

1) The raw video which is stored on DVD and available for any court proceedings. This version is not altered in any way.

2) The over-redacted version which this post is about. This version is intentionally altered to try and remove any identifying features from the subjects, including suspects and also filters out videos involving specific crimes (rape or involving kids). This video is not used for any legal proceedings; it's primary purpose is to allow interested parties to review police interactions with the public.

3) Videos legally requested under disclosure laws. These are manually redacted to remove the minimum required by law to protect peoples privacy. Depending on the subjects this would generally look like the videos you see on COPS where the subjects are clearly visible but some bystanders are blurred.

The idea is that by providing the second type of videos they can reduce FOIA or similar legal requests because in most cases seeing exactly who was involved is much less important as seeing what was done to and by each person involved in the incident. Before the existence of the over-redacted versions every request to view police body cams resulted in the the need to create a manually redacted version and this took up to 1 hour/minute to process.