Power Trippin'

A Baltimore cop is being sued by a surly kid after he was assaulted while taking a break with his friends during a round of skateboarding on the street. The details of why the cop went ballistic on the kid and proceed to manhandle him aren't exactly clear, but from watching the video of the altercation, it appears that the cop didn't need too much provocation after the 14 year old wouldn't stop addressing him as dude and man and generally just talking back and taunting him.
The sum, six million, which seems a rather ridiculous amount. What's even stranger is the fact that the kids parents only decided to get litigious on the cop 10 months after the incident occurred. There's no doubt that this cop is a bully and has anger issues. He was definitely excessive in his behavior toward the punk and I'll bet this isn't the first time this officer's gone off the rails with his temper. Anger management classes and some desk duty might be the best course of action for this dude.

Ponzi Schemer

As greed goes, no one had seemingly done it better than the fictional character, Gordon Gekko (Wallstreet).

He coined infamous phrases like:
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good.
Greed is right.
Greed works.
Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind.

Well, there is a real life person that would agree whole heartedly with these philosophies and that would be one Bernie Madoff, who headed up an investment securities firm catering to very high profile clients. While Mr. Gekko was into corporate takeovers at any cost, Bernie gained the trust of his investors, many of whom were "personal" friends and conned them out of millions of dollars, which he did very slowly and quite methodically.
Madoff's advisory business had $17.1 billion of assets.
As the supposed lone mastermind behind one of the largest investment fraud schemes, he was finally arrested in NY this week.
Among his prominent victims was Mort Zuckerman, owner of the New York Daily News and US News & World Report, who ran a fund with considerable sums invested. You can usually catch him sitting in on the political round table discussions at the weekend with the McLaughlin group. Something tells me he'll be MIA for a while, cleaning up his financial messes.
Also caught in this bilking was Steven Spielberg. His charity, the Wunderkinder Foundation, was a client.

Our current world economic crisis as it stands really didn't need any more casualties.
I guess there's a reason why greed is listed as the first of the 7 deadly sins.

Good job Bernie!

Xenophobic Fools

Within a very short period of time a gang of Russian skinheads committed 19 racially motivated murders and 12 assaults on "immigrants".
There are currently over 142 million people living in Russia and many of those citizens are not born nationals. This has many nationalists up in arms, claiming that "foreigners" are taking away their jobs and basic economic rights. This year alone, 86 people were killed in Russia based on "racial grounds".
The skinheads that committed the crimes were bold (or stupid) enough to record them on cellphone cameras and post them on the web.
President Putin was quoted as saying that Russia would crack down on racist violence after human rights leaders complained that the police were actively ignoring these attacks and doing nothing to protect the public.
Exile these guys to Siberia and be done with it!

Barbarians at the gate

I wish I could adequately express my disgust in the human race and wonder what it will take to shake people up to the reality that you can't go around acting like barbarians in this day and age...much less for a damn sale!
Black Friday certainly came in with a bang this year.
How ironic is it that the masses line up outside of retail shops to take advantage of drastically reduced sale prices just after the day they are meant to be giving thanks for what they already have and end up killing innocent people in the process.
Two morons outside of Toys R Us gunned each other down in California and a worker at Wal-Mart in NY was trampled and killed after a mob frenzy took place as they let 2,000 idiots loose into the store. These shoppers were so desperate to score on super low sales that they continued streaming into the store and just stepped over the workers body!
One woman said shoppers were acting like "savages." When officials said to the crowds that they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling 'I've been on line since yesterday morning..."They kept shopping."
A Wal-Mart spokesperson called the employees death a "tragic situation," but defended itself by saying it added staffers and outside security workers and put up barricades to try to prepare for the crush.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!