How many people did we torture to death the last six years? Over a hundred, from Gitmo and Iraqi accounts. How many innocent? Good chunk. We killed dozens under torture and stress. I can't live with that. We aren't that important. No country is.
No failure of intelligence analysis. The plot to use planes as bombs was identified and presented to Bush in his National Security Briefing the week before the attack. You know. "Bin Laden Determined to Strike within America". Clinton's terrorism experts pleaded with Rice to take the threat seriously.
Bush went on retreat to think about the poor unborn stem cells the week after he was informed of the possible attack. We know from common sense that the idiot never reads a single report on his desk. He gets his info from his staff: Cheney.
And the FBI had intel from an agent that strange characters were training to fly airliners and not land them. He was ignored. You see, Freeh, the FBI director, had "trimmed" an entire analytical layer from the organization, a layer he had always despised as bureaucrats. He consolidated intel distillation at a higher level. A much smaller number of analysts were trying to make sense of reports that before had been read by hundreds of agents. The FBI had been lobotomized. You can't kill brain cells with impunity.
Nope. What warrants do is provide the citizenry with a RECORD of what was wiretapped. Without warrants, no need to keep track, no finger pointing, no one to stop the executive from using the police state apparatus to crush its opposition.
So, if a bomb goes off (it hasn't) anytime after 9-11-01, then the gigantic and completely unconstitutional police state is justified? And if it doesn't go off, it's still justified? So, therefore, a police state is the only logical form of government until such time as a bomb can never, ever go off? When would that be, when we are all wired to mind-reading machines connected to HAL?
We've had lots of bombs go off. Some, like the "bomb" in the USS Maine in Cuba that launched our takeover of the Philipines, Cuba and Puerto Rico, didn't even really exist. Europe has been bombed by separatists and nationalists for decades. Somehow they managed not to build torture centers overseas. At least, most didn't. And they still managed to maintain constitutional government.
As the rest of the world has been saying with clenched teeth, grow. up. already. We aren't the first country to ever have been bombed. Stop wetting your pants. Get a grip, you pansies. And kindly stop killing any and all brown people who seem to be sitting on oil. Kinda obvious, ya know, how we determine who is "evil".
The attackers never used phones, fax machines, email, or snail mail. The security we had before 9-11 was more than adequate; the Bushies and the Freeh-crippled FBI simply did not listen to the warnings. The bin Ladens were made, so were the men training to only fly, not land, planes. The Bush was warned about planes being used as bombs, he convened with Jesus to think about the poor unborn stem cells that week instead. The FBI under Freeh fired the entire middle level of intel analysis under his fetish of getting rid of "useless" bureaucrats. He consolidated intel decisions into upper levels, his levels, and they ignored the warnings because they were undermanned.
There will be always people with bombs, even if they are eternally in your imagination. And, say, what about that pesky anthrax terrorist that hit Democrats? Osama bin Laden? What about the militia groups, armed to the teeth to bring revolution to the socialists in Washington, the groups that spawned the only successful native terrorist act in Oklahoma City? Are we rounding THOSE loons up yet? The entire nation of Saudi Arabia, ya know, the actual country that attacked us on 9-11? Why aren't we at "war" with anyone who actually attacked us?
GPS tracking good to a few feet has been mandatory in all cell phones sold in the US since 2005. You are already carrying a tracking device. As for the menu choice to disable it: oh, please.
Absolutely stunning. Find a tracking device on your person or car, assume it's all for the best and continue life as a Good Citizen, for of course nothing wrong happens to innocent people in a criminal justice system. No one gets kidnapped and shipped to Syria to have their penis razored once a month, then stored in a 3x6 coffin hole for over a year at our government's request. No one gets accused of a capital crime because they were nearby when it occurred. Innocent people don't get plastic tubes shoved down their throats to be force fed when they try to suicide after a half decade of illegal imprisonment in solitary. Mistakes may happen, but that's the cost of living in a free, safe country. Screw those hippies.
Of course, the tracking devices could be planted by a deranged cult like the Moonies, Hubbardism or LDS, or a non-regulated corporate agency, or a foreign spy service. But that's not possible, because... well, because.
Where... where are you people coming from? Not the America I grew up in.
The Scientologists have claimed eight million members for over a decade. Now ten?
Not true, as in a lie. They count EVERYone who ever walked into a storefront vacuum cleaner as a member. We really need to stop and challenge this UFO cult when they can't even be honest about the rolls. I am always incensed when a reporter accepts the multimillion member organization as a given, when the organization itself is the only source. Census data does not bear out their claims. And since most Hubbardites are US based, their given number means that they claim to have on average 200,000 members in every state in the union. Uh uh, not true.
And for those who will counter that we only killed 60,000 men women and kids, the only totals the US will admit to:
ONLY 60,000?????? Will you listen to yourselves for once?!? Why do you think they hate you? Because people who think "it was only 60,000, you wanker!" are sociopaths. Turn the lights down, sit down with a stiff drink, and reflect for a few hours on why it is acceptable to kill 60K innocents rather than 650K. Morality isn't about where you put your penis, Senator McCain, it's where you put your napalm and burning white phosphorus. Evil is when you think of people as things. Disposable things. And think about your racism while your at it. You'd never think that way about the people in your neighborhood. This delusional thinking has to be rooted out. If you all want to survive. They do outnumber you. And you are in the wrong; the world turned its face away years ago. We can go burn as far as they care now.
We are alone and loathed, and it ain't because we have Lincoln Navigators.
"Terrorism" is asymmetrical warfare. When non-US attackers kills Americans, it's terrorism. When the US kills 650,000, it's somehow not. I think the Iraqis are pretty terrorized.
It's a null concept. You can't have a war against "Terror", unless of course, as is well understood in the Red portions of the US, that it is a code word for Islamic countries.
We can't spend 60 billion on dark ops along, and over a trillion on Iraq, and another buncha money on our new police state, unless there is an Enemy. We have invented one called "terrorism". You can never find it, never kill it, never beat it. Osama, who cares, Bush doesn't think about him, as he said on the record. We have Terror, the omnipresent, bearded, devious, anti-freedom, jealous killers that we can't name but sure can build systems to find and spend money to shoot stuff.
The "terrorists" who attacked us on 9-11 had specific grievances that we still haven't listened to. We have slaughtered, bamboozled, overthrown governments. And we don't, and this is the infuriating bit, have the courtesy to even remember what we did. Not only are they pissed, they are pissed and ignored. We are the amnesiac killers of millions.
And we just outright killed a hundred thousand people when we slaughtered Iraq. Another 550,000 died after. Hundreds of thousands of stumps and burns and orphans and girls selling themselves in Syria to help their families survive as refugees. Two million people have fled the country, another million are wandering around homeless in country. In twenty years, those orphans of our little game of Get-The-Guy-Who-Tried-To-Kill-Mah-Daddy will come back to kill us in our beds. And we won't remember why. But we will justify the slaughter we then will instigate as a response to an unprovoked attack against our innocent people. Terrorism, we will cry, Bush was right, it is war unending, why, why are they so insane...
I know you are being sarcastic, but under the new President-is-God-Protector law of last month, no warrants are needed for anything as long as the President thinks it necessary to wage never ending war against unnamed enemies who can never be found. Warrants are dead. We have a police state now. It's done. Even if the Demos repeal some of the more odious crap, most will remain. Paranoiacs, racists, fools, and businessmen love the new supersekrit We See You but You'll Never Know til You Disappear system. Money, eternal war against the Other.
Yes, let the million "tinfoil hat" and "conspiracy theory" snarkers hold forth. Lemme explain:
YOU'RE WRONG. They are using cellphones as tracking devices and bugs, they ARE capable of listening to your phones and watching your surfing and building databases of everything you are and do. They will build profiles and scoop up people they don't like. They can and are using their new powers to punish the opponents of their new powers. And we're just getting warmed up.
As for the "so what?" crowd: if a tool for oppression is built, it will be used. It HAS been used. Innocent people are going to never-never land. Torture (solitary is torture, first, and the rest is just gravy) is now accepted and lauded. Thousands of verified innocents have been kidnapped, tens of thousands of people can't fly, and now they are sealing the borders. "Conspiracy" my ass, they are doing it out in the sunshine. Cheney just had federal arrest warrants issued for some college students that mooned him last April. I don't believe that that is a crime warranting federal involvement, but apparently we have a king now, and he makes up whatever law he likes. How did they find those kids? Supersekrit police state tech.
Children, if it can be done, it will be done, IF you don't grow some backbones and insist that they don't do it. They take your massive silence as assent. Put down the game controllers and pay attention before they castrate you all.
eBay will not list for sale a used Scientology E-meter. The Scienos claim "copyright" over the object. eBay knows that that is nonsense, but you see, it's about the terror of consequences. Laws exist, but then there's anti-law, the underworld of lawyers and harassment.
Doesn't matter what the legal problem with refusing the Chinese torture machine was. There is an overriding moral imperative not to turn in free men to torture by tyrants.
If the current corporate moral climate stipulates that doing business with the tyrant is the overriding concern, then it is time to write some new laws. Repeal their "personhood". Make corporate executives personally liable for their decisions. And perhaps we can reintroduce an orignal limitation of corporate existence: expiration dates of the corporate charter. Corporations were intended to be a creature of limited lifespan. They were not intended to be immortal nation-states.
We have monopoly laws, not to outlaw monopolies, but to prevent ONE company from using overwhelming advantage in one market from simply buying out, in turn, all and any other markets they care to. We have laws preventing this. If they were actually enforced. Microsoft would be in a straitjacket but for the Bush Justice Department walking in on a fait accompli dismantling of their corporate advantage after Judge Jackson's spanking, and simply tossing the conviction out the window by ignoring it.
Now they are openly -- brazenly -- buying markets. And the DOJ doesn't give a damn. Well, they'd best hurry, the Repubs are about to lose power for a decade or more. Steal what you can, "retired" Mr. Gates.
You are misstating. Firing isn't illegal, but that is not the question. Firing banks of US attorneys for the sole reason that they would not bring false charges of voting fraud against Democratic candidates days before the election IS illegal, and not only that but against the rules of the Justice Department itself. They were pressuring US attorneys to interfere with elections for Republican political gain. Rove and Gonzales through intermediaries planted fake "problems" with illegal aliens and voter fraud into the public consciousness through right wing radio and Murdoch and his clones' fake news outlets. They then pointed the USA's at the matters and wanted charges filed. Most did so, many did not on the grounds that the charges were nonsense or flimsy and the charges too closely fitted to coincide with the election cycle. The USAs were given to understand that they would be fired if they did not follow the AG's strongly recommended advice to file charges. And they WERE fired. If that isn't illegal, if that isn't fascism, then the words are meaningless to the right to an almost Scientological degree. We aren't even speaking the same dialect of English, if you think that was legal. The JD is not supposed to e a political hit squad for the Republican party. That. Is. Fascism.
What artists? Artists get two revenue streams from the record labels: Jack, and Shit. If we're talking profit sharing from downloaded music, they now pay a New Technology Fee or whatever steaming pile the label types into the profit sheet, and get even less than Jack and Shit.
No one is punching any artist in the mouth. We are punching the labels in the mouth.
Artists make money on performances, live performances, as that is the last bastion of revenue that the labels can't steal via their accountants.
Let a million punches smash into the faces of the labels. Forever.
Let's them spend a few hundred billion dollars and buy all the homes in the US solar panels. Cost problem solved.
Why are we going on about false cost analyses? Oil is subsidized to the tunes of trillions. Yes. The Iraq and soon Iranian war - bear with me here - are already costing a trillion, with Bush promising to stay decades, which will easily cost another trillion. For our money, a lot of contractors are immensely wealthy and the oil has been, well, stolen. And the oil prices went way up and will stay there. So we spend a lot to lock up oil fields, shut off the spigot, and then pay out more to get what oil we can get.
So let's peel off a trillion or so for solar. Build the giant manufacturing plants -- AND NOT IN CHINA, DAMMIT. Here.
As a benny, we build -- this is serious -- plants that will decrease the cost per unit to an acceptable level. No more underfunded startups begging for investor cash.
And let's spend another trillion and develop new battery tech and fund the factories to drop the unit cost down. Buy out and nationalize all those patents that are dying in the dark, make them work for us. Especially sieze the patents on battery and solar tech that Exxon-Mobile are sitting on.
We'd SAVE trillions and trillions of dollars that will otherwise pump directly into oil companies and "enemy" states as defined by the Warriors on Terror. If national security is so important that we can torch the Constitution and turn ourselves into a Totally Information Aware lockup, at a cost of trillions, we can spend a couple trillion to make us *completely* energy independent of the world.
The free markets can't hack together what we need in the time we need it. Time to bypass to save our own butts. And save a fortune. Gigafortune.
FTA: "The Copowi terms of service (TOS) provide some flexibility in these situations; the company tells users that they may not "violate laws, infringe the rights of others, interfere with users of our network or other networks, or otherwise violate our Acceptable Use Policy set forth on our Internet Services web site."
Telephone companies aren't required to monitor phone conversations of its users for illegality. This is because they are common carriers, a legal designation that relieves them of that responsibility. I don't recall anyone, Dillinger, Capone, drug dealers of your choice, or bordellos that have ever had their phone service terminated because they used it in service of a crime. They only cut you off if you don't pay up on time.
Yet somehow, ISPs, which are common carriers, monitor us in a fashion that would stagger George Orwell (even he didn't envision EVERYONE being monitored 24/7 in his most dystopic dreams). And we accept being made to stand at attention and have our privates searched continuously... for movie and record companies? Who make a fraction of what the computer and ISP industry makes? How mobbed up are those companies that everyone in Congress dances to their call?
Well, on thought, perhaps he was tweaking us a little for fun. But he was a firm proponent of technological solutions for hard problems, so the Cities were fun for him to imagine. He was a NYC boy to the core. He left his typewriter rarely, and the city at gunpoint.
In Britain, already done: if you PROTEST against the government or corporate power or what have you that infuriates them, as of now they are invoking anti-terrorist protocols against the protesters. Reason? Not that they are terrorists. They are being treated as terrorists because - this is new - the use of police and supersekrit stormtrooper ninja master sergeants on the streets reduces the government's ability to respond to a real attack elsewhere during the protest, and therefore the protesters are enabling the potential attacks and must be treated as terrorists themselves. This means ANY overt protest or speech become "terrorist", and the full range of those lovely new Bush-Blair police state powers are now available to punish a citizen who "ties up" the police by "forcing" the police to deal with their anarchic free speech.
Slashdot Mirror
How many people did we torture to death the last six years? Over a hundred, from Gitmo and Iraqi accounts. How many innocent? Good chunk. We killed dozens under torture and stress. I can't live with that. We aren't that important. No country is.
And you are joining the Army, when? I do believe they need you. Go get 'em, tiger.
"grammar". not "grammer".
No failure of intelligence analysis. The plot to use planes as bombs was identified and presented to Bush in his National Security Briefing the week before the attack. You know. "Bin Laden Determined to Strike within America". Clinton's terrorism experts pleaded with Rice to take the threat seriously.
Bush went on retreat to think about the poor unborn stem cells the week after he was informed of the possible attack. We know from common sense that the idiot never reads a single report on his desk. He gets his info from his staff: Cheney.
And the FBI had intel from an agent that strange characters were training to fly airliners and not land them. He was ignored. You see, Freeh, the FBI director, had "trimmed" an entire analytical layer from the organization, a layer he had always despised as bureaucrats. He consolidated intel distillation at a higher level. A much smaller number of analysts were trying to make sense of reports that before had been read by hundreds of agents. The FBI had been lobotomized. You can't kill brain cells with impunity.
Nope. What warrants do is provide the citizenry with a RECORD of what was wiretapped. Without warrants, no need to keep track, no finger pointing, no one to stop the executive from using the police state apparatus to crush its opposition.
So, if a bomb goes off (it hasn't) anytime after 9-11-01, then the gigantic and completely unconstitutional police state is justified? And if it doesn't go off, it's still justified? So, therefore, a police state is the only logical form of government until such time as a bomb can never, ever go off? When would that be, when we are all wired to mind-reading machines connected to HAL?
We've had lots of bombs go off. Some, like the "bomb" in the USS Maine in Cuba that launched our takeover of the Philipines, Cuba and Puerto Rico, didn't even really exist. Europe has been bombed by separatists and nationalists for decades. Somehow they managed not to build torture centers overseas. At least, most didn't. And they still managed to maintain constitutional government.
As the rest of the world has been saying with clenched teeth, grow. up. already. We aren't the first country to ever have been bombed. Stop wetting your pants. Get a grip, you pansies. And kindly stop killing any and all brown people who seem to be sitting on oil. Kinda obvious, ya know, how we determine who is "evil".
The attackers never used phones, fax machines, email, or snail mail. The security we had before 9-11 was more than adequate; the Bushies and the Freeh-crippled FBI simply did not listen to the warnings. The bin Ladens were made, so were the men training to only fly, not land, planes. The Bush was warned about planes being used as bombs, he convened with Jesus to think about the poor unborn stem cells that week instead. The FBI under Freeh fired the entire middle level of intel analysis under his fetish of getting rid of "useless" bureaucrats. He consolidated intel decisions into upper levels, his levels, and they ignored the warnings because they were undermanned.
There will be always people with bombs, even if they are eternally in your imagination. And, say, what about that pesky anthrax terrorist that hit Democrats? Osama bin Laden? What about the militia groups, armed to the teeth to bring revolution to the socialists in Washington, the groups that spawned the only successful native terrorist act in Oklahoma City? Are we rounding THOSE loons up yet? The entire nation of Saudi Arabia, ya know, the actual country that attacked us on 9-11? Why aren't we at "war" with anyone who actually attacked us?
I'm not alone! Someone else mentions that all phones are GPS tracking devices with logs of phone movement.
Q: Now that the iPhone has been hacked, can the internal GPS tracking device be spoofed?
GPS tracking good to a few feet has been mandatory in all cell phones sold in the US since 2005. You are already carrying a tracking device. As for the menu choice to disable it: oh, please.
Absolutely stunning. Find a tracking device on your person or car, assume it's all for the best and continue life as a Good Citizen, for of course nothing wrong happens to innocent people in a criminal justice system. No one gets kidnapped and shipped to Syria to have their penis razored once a month, then stored in a 3x6 coffin hole for over a year at our government's request. No one gets accused of a capital crime because they were nearby when it occurred. Innocent people don't get plastic tubes shoved down their throats to be force fed when they try to suicide after a half decade of illegal imprisonment in solitary. Mistakes may happen, but that's the cost of living in a free, safe country. Screw those hippies.
Of course, the tracking devices could be planted by a deranged cult like the Moonies, Hubbardism or LDS, or a non-regulated corporate agency, or a foreign spy service. But that's not possible, because... well, because.
Where... where are you people coming from? Not the America I grew up in.
"but don't make me listen to it."
No one is making you read it. That's your choice. Amusing little thread, tho.
The Scientologists have claimed eight million members for over a decade. Now ten?
Not true, as in a lie. They count EVERYone who ever walked into a storefront vacuum cleaner as a member. We really need to stop and challenge this UFO cult when they can't even be honest about the rolls. I am always incensed when a reporter accepts the multimillion member organization as a given, when the organization itself is the only source. Census data does not bear out their claims. And since most Hubbardites are US based, their given number means that they claim to have on average 200,000 members in every state in the union. Uh uh, not true.
And for those who will counter that we only killed 60,000 men women and kids, the only totals the US will admit to:
ONLY 60,000?????? Will you listen to yourselves for once?!? Why do you think they hate you? Because people who think "it was only 60,000, you wanker!" are sociopaths. Turn the lights down, sit down with a stiff drink, and reflect for a few hours on why it is acceptable to kill 60K innocents rather than 650K. Morality isn't about where you put your penis, Senator McCain, it's where you put your napalm and burning white phosphorus. Evil is when you think of people as things. Disposable things. And think about your racism while your at it. You'd never think that way about the people in your neighborhood. This delusional thinking has to be rooted out. If you all want to survive. They do outnumber you. And you are in the wrong; the world turned its face away years ago. We can go burn as far as they care now.
We are alone and loathed, and it ain't because we have Lincoln Navigators.
"Terrorism" is asymmetrical warfare. When non-US attackers kills Americans, it's terrorism. When the US kills 650,000, it's somehow not. I think the Iraqis are pretty terrorized.
It's a null concept. You can't have a war against "Terror", unless of course, as is well understood in the Red portions of the US, that it is a code word for Islamic countries.
We can't spend 60 billion on dark ops along, and over a trillion on Iraq, and another buncha money on our new police state, unless there is an Enemy. We have invented one called "terrorism". You can never find it, never kill it, never beat it. Osama, who cares, Bush doesn't think about him, as he said on the record. We have Terror, the omnipresent, bearded, devious, anti-freedom, jealous killers that we can't name but sure can build systems to find and spend money to shoot stuff.
The "terrorists" who attacked us on 9-11 had specific grievances that we still haven't listened to. We have slaughtered, bamboozled, overthrown governments. And we don't, and this is the infuriating bit, have the courtesy to even remember what we did. Not only are they pissed, they are pissed and ignored. We are the amnesiac killers of millions.
And we just outright killed a hundred thousand people when we slaughtered Iraq. Another 550,000 died after. Hundreds of thousands of stumps and burns and orphans and girls selling themselves in Syria to help their families survive as refugees. Two million people have fled the country, another million are wandering around homeless in country. In twenty years, those orphans of our little game of Get-The-Guy-Who-Tried-To-Kill-Mah-Daddy will come back to kill us in our beds. And we won't remember why. But we will justify the slaughter we then will instigate as a response to an unprovoked attack against our innocent people. Terrorism, we will cry, Bush was right, it is war unending, why, why are they so insane...
I know you are being sarcastic, but under the new President-is-God-Protector law of last month, no warrants are needed for anything as long as the President thinks it necessary to wage never ending war against unnamed enemies who can never be found. Warrants are dead. We have a police state now. It's done. Even if the Demos repeal some of the more odious crap, most will remain. Paranoiacs, racists, fools, and businessmen love the new supersekrit We See You but You'll Never Know til You Disappear system. Money, eternal war against the Other.
Thought: there is no such thing as "terrorism", and it doesn't warrant a police state.
Yes, let the million "tinfoil hat" and "conspiracy theory" snarkers hold forth. Lemme explain:
YOU'RE WRONG. They are using cellphones as tracking devices and bugs, they ARE capable of listening to your phones and watching your surfing and building databases of everything you are and do. They will build profiles and scoop up people they don't like. They can and are using their new powers to punish the opponents of their new powers. And we're just getting warmed up.
As for the "so what?" crowd: if a tool for oppression is built, it will be used. It HAS been used. Innocent people are going to never-never land. Torture (solitary is torture, first, and the rest is just gravy) is now accepted and lauded. Thousands of verified innocents have been kidnapped, tens of thousands of people can't fly, and now they are sealing the borders. "Conspiracy" my ass, they are doing it out in the sunshine. Cheney just had federal arrest warrants issued for some college students that mooned him last April. I don't believe that that is a crime warranting federal involvement, but apparently we have a king now, and he makes up whatever law he likes. How did they find those kids? Supersekrit police state tech.
Children, if it can be done, it will be done, IF you don't grow some backbones and insist that they don't do it. They take your massive silence as assent. Put down the game controllers and pay attention before they castrate you all.
eBay will not list for sale a used Scientology E-meter. The Scienos claim "copyright" over the object. eBay knows that that is nonsense, but you see, it's about the terror of consequences. Laws exist, but then there's anti-law, the underworld of lawyers and harassment.
Doesn't matter what the legal problem with refusing the Chinese torture machine was. There is an overriding moral imperative not to turn in free men to torture by tyrants.
If the current corporate moral climate stipulates that doing business with the tyrant is the overriding concern, then it is time to write some new laws. Repeal their "personhood". Make corporate executives personally liable for their decisions. And perhaps we can reintroduce an orignal limitation of corporate existence: expiration dates of the corporate charter. Corporations were intended to be a creature of limited lifespan. They were not intended to be immortal nation-states.
We have monopoly laws, not to outlaw monopolies, but to prevent ONE company from using overwhelming advantage in one market from simply buying out, in turn, all and any other markets they care to. We have laws preventing this. If they were actually enforced. Microsoft would be in a straitjacket but for the Bush Justice Department walking in on a fait accompli dismantling of their corporate advantage after Judge Jackson's spanking, and simply tossing the conviction out the window by ignoring it.
Now they are openly -- brazenly -- buying markets. And the DOJ doesn't give a damn. Well, they'd best hurry, the Repubs are about to lose power for a decade or more. Steal what you can, "retired" Mr. Gates.
You are misstating. Firing isn't illegal, but that is not the question. Firing banks of US attorneys for the sole reason that they would not bring false charges of voting fraud against Democratic candidates days before the election IS illegal, and not only that but against the rules of the Justice Department itself. They were pressuring US attorneys to interfere with elections for Republican political gain. Rove and Gonzales through intermediaries planted fake "problems" with illegal aliens and voter fraud into the public consciousness through right wing radio and Murdoch and his clones' fake news outlets. They then pointed the USA's at the matters and wanted charges filed. Most did so, many did not on the grounds that the charges were nonsense or flimsy and the charges too closely fitted to coincide with the election cycle. The USAs were given to understand that they would be fired if they did not follow the AG's strongly recommended advice to file charges. And they WERE fired. If that isn't illegal, if that isn't fascism, then the words are meaningless to the right to an almost Scientological degree. We aren't even speaking the same dialect of English, if you think that was legal. The JD is not supposed to e a political hit squad for the Republican party. That. Is. Fascism.
What artists? Artists get two revenue streams from the record labels: Jack, and Shit. If we're talking profit sharing from downloaded music, they now pay a New Technology Fee or whatever steaming pile the label types into the profit sheet, and get even less than Jack and Shit.
No one is punching any artist in the mouth. We are punching the labels in the mouth.
Artists make money on performances, live performances, as that is the last bastion of revenue that the labels can't steal via their accountants.
Let a million punches smash into the faces of the labels. Forever.
Let's them spend a few hundred billion dollars and buy all the homes in the US solar panels. Cost problem solved.
Why are we going on about false cost analyses? Oil is subsidized to the tunes of trillions. Yes. The Iraq and soon Iranian war - bear with me here - are already costing a trillion, with Bush promising to stay decades, which will easily cost another trillion. For our money, a lot of contractors are immensely wealthy and the oil has been, well, stolen. And the oil prices went way up and will stay there. So we spend a lot to lock up oil fields, shut off the spigot, and then pay out more to get what oil we can get.
So let's peel off a trillion or so for solar. Build the giant manufacturing plants -- AND NOT IN CHINA, DAMMIT. Here.
As a benny, we build -- this is serious -- plants that will decrease the cost per unit to an acceptable level. No more underfunded startups begging for investor cash.
And let's spend another trillion and develop new battery tech and fund the factories to drop the unit cost down. Buy out and nationalize all those patents that are dying in the dark, make them work for us. Especially sieze the patents on battery and solar tech that Exxon-Mobile are sitting on.
We'd SAVE trillions and trillions of dollars that will otherwise pump directly into oil companies and "enemy" states as defined by the Warriors on Terror. If national security is so important that we can torch the Constitution and turn ourselves into a Totally Information Aware lockup, at a cost of trillions, we can spend a couple trillion to make us *completely* energy independent of the world.
The free markets can't hack together what we need in the time we need it. Time to bypass to save our own butts. And save a fortune. Gigafortune.
FTA: "The Copowi terms of service (TOS) provide some flexibility in these situations; the company tells users that they may not "violate laws, infringe the rights of others, interfere with users of our network or other networks, or otherwise violate our Acceptable Use Policy set forth on our Internet Services web site."
Telephone companies aren't required to monitor phone conversations of its users for illegality. This is because they are common carriers, a legal designation that relieves them of that responsibility. I don't recall anyone, Dillinger, Capone, drug dealers of your choice, or bordellos that have ever had their phone service terminated because they used it in service of a crime. They only cut you off if you don't pay up on time.
Yet somehow, ISPs, which are common carriers, monitor us in a fashion that would stagger George Orwell (even he didn't envision EVERYONE being monitored 24/7 in his most dystopic dreams). And we accept being made to stand at attention and have our privates searched continuously... for movie and record companies? Who make a fraction of what the computer and ISP industry makes? How mobbed up are those companies that everyone in Congress dances to their call?
Well, on thought, perhaps he was tweaking us a little for fun. But he was a firm proponent of technological solutions for hard problems, so the Cities were fun for him to imagine. He was a NYC boy to the core. He left his typewriter rarely, and the city at gunpoint.
In Britain, already done: if you PROTEST against the government or corporate power or what have you that infuriates them, as of now they are invoking anti-terrorist protocols against the protesters. Reason? Not that they are terrorists. They are being treated as terrorists because - this is new - the use of police and supersekrit stormtrooper ninja master sergeants on the streets reduces the government's ability to respond to a real attack elsewhere during the protest, and therefore the protesters are enabling the potential attacks and must be treated as terrorists themselves. This means ANY overt protest or speech become "terrorist", and the full range of those lovely new Bush-Blair police state powers are now available to punish a citizen who "ties up" the police by "forcing" the police to deal with their anarchic free speech.
Get the hell out of the UK and US, people.