What's a "criminal"? Pot smokers? Drug dealers -- would they exist if you didn't make the drugs illegal in the first place? "Terrorists"? We haven't caught a single "terrorist" since the Total American Meltdown began in 2001. For one thing, the "terrorists" were in the planes, and they are dead, dead, dead. Everyone else you "caught" accused of being terrorists were either guilty by association with someone else who was guilty by association, or were fingered by some murdering thugs in Afghanistan as a "terrorist" for a fifty grand bounty. Show me one damn "terrorist" you've all found. What the hell is a "terrorist"? All we've sucked down for over six years was to protect us from the mighty hidden army of "terrorists" that you've all insisted were all around us, ready to kill in God's name. And there are none.
You catch a murderer, fine. But we've killed over 60,000 innocents to punish 19 dead men. Who catches us? We've created a massive opium market in Afghanistan which the Taliban had previously wiped out, because we installed organized crime, the "Warlords", as the government. Who arrests us for this? Caught a thief? We've literally emptied twenty billion in cash from the Iraqi treasury, loaded it onto pallets in a warehouse, and handed it out in paper bags to American-only contractors. Who's going down for that? Caught a torturer? Ditto us. Pedophile? We've stood by while kids were raped in Iraqi jails by guards.
What the supersecret American Spy System has probably found were poor people who did stupid things for money. The big criminals stole hundreds of billions from pension funds and through kickbacks and understandings from deals to downsize and outsource. But rich people never commit crimes. Only poor, insane, or stupid people do.
Professional spies don't have criminal histories. They aren't catching spooks, they're keeping people who got caught smoking weed once in McJobs for the rest of their lives. Soon enough, with laws against everything from felony thoughtcrime to felony attempted copyright infringement, the only employables will be the people who lived in gated communities where they can control the cops' access to their lives.
The real criminals are running the spook agencies, major corporations, and gigantic cults. Those bastards are never going to see the inside of a lockup.
Re:So get off the corporate treadmill, already.
on
Treadmill Workstation
·
· Score: 1
Point taken, but I'm actually coming at it from a broad perspective. Not everyone can get off the corporate wheel, actually not possible at all. So, broad solutions for everyone, not just me.
I've been you as well. A few years ago, I hopped off for a year, rode a bike, grew strong and healthy and enjoyed life off the corporate grid for a bit. I'm back on to get health insurance for less than a thousand a month.
I can open a comic book shop or a consultancy, yes. But what about the other 90 percent who can't? We all hang together or we hang separately.
Obstruction of justice is a crime. Congress does have oversight of the hiring and firing of US Attorneys. Bush is not king, and Fox News repeatedly saying he is doesn't make it so.
Once again, if he canned prosecutors for not filing false charges of voter fraud against Democrats in close races weeks before the November election, that is fraud in and of itself. The prosecutors involved say the tit for tat was understood: kill the Democrats and live, or fail to charge and be gone. Those who chose integrity were canned.
And: knowing full well after the landslide Democratic victory that investigations were coming and US Attorneys would be filing charges should it be necessary against Bush and his people -- and he seems to know that it was a certainty, given the news the last few days about the power struggle between the Bushies and the DOJ -- he was intentionally larding up the USA's ranks with absolutely faithful Republicans known for their loyalty to Bush and his cause. This is obstruction of justice with a bullet.
"DanRathering". Find an error, any error, even if it's hypothetical, and the bulk of the rest of the evidence doesn't matter. Fixate on a detail, "falsify" it in any way possible, than homeopathically transmit that "false" datum's attributes to the rest of the data. Magic. It takes a special kind of mind to work that way. Unfortunately, most do.
If he fired them because they would not file false charges of voter fraud, or because he wanted to replace them with sure-fire Bushies who wouldn't prosecute him no matter what the Congress found, then his pleasure doesn't matter. This is why the Congress oversees the hiring and firing of US Attorneys. They do NOT serve at the President's pleasure, but at the pleasure of the Congress, ultimately. If Bush and his people can be shown to manipulate the USAs to prepare false charges against Democrats or to refuse to file charges against his people, then it's time for a special prosecutor -- tho the Special Prosecutor law ended at the end of the Clinton term, oddly enough, and wasn't renewed -- and an impeachment and conviction for obstruction of justice, at the very least. followed by removal. We can't let him run out the clock as he's doing now.
And if he did indeed knowingly start a war against innocents, then he should be shipped to the Hague for prosecution of war crimes against humanity. Stupidity or refusal to listen to contrary facts is not an excuse for murder.
I'm serious. Unlike those detention camps Kellogg, Root and Brown are building for Bush's future projects, our Dixie Gulags will be built by actual hippies. You will spend the rest of your life tending organic gardens and making clothes for poor daschund puppy orphans in Venezuela. Hell, we'll put the gulags in Cuba AND Venezuala, what you might call the DEEP Deep South. And you'll watch Barbara Streisand and Jane Fonda movies each and every night. And Phil Donohue in the mornings, of course, once we get him a new show.
And, may I add, you can't fire USA's because they refuse to file charges of fraud without suffient evidence. Charges that Rove and company wanted filed just before the election in '06.
Also, people aren't saying it out loud, so I will: the USAs were canned post-election, when Bush's coterie knew investigators were a-comin' soon. They were loading up the US Attorneys with pro-Bush people, I mean, hard-core Bushies, known to be loyal to the party come what may. This is a flavor of obstruction which is so profound we don't even have a name for it. "Fixing" the investigation by putting in your made guys.
Toyota has the patents, and now has the plans to dominate. Think: hybrids are just electric cars with gasoline engines. When batteries and capacitors become cheap and can do the entire job, the cars are ready for them. Minimum fuss.
The American executives are still muttering about hippies and horsepower. They just aren't getting it.
Greg Palast, an American working for BBC news, is of the miniscule number of investigative journalists working to open up the can of worms the last six years. He's literally a man in exile because he can't get play here in the US. He's blow open so many crimes that it's tiring to list them. I am quite sure his work finding the emails will be complete ignored.
Up 'til now, no animal breeder has developed a calf that will walk into an enclosed pen of its own free will, tenderize itself while eating rich foods, then demand that it and its mates be slaughtered in the name of the free market.
Oops. Bad form, but to make the fourth paragraph make sense, I meant to say: hire H1B or can me and hire someone more desperate -- lots of them now -- who won't complain and won't notice, being too young to see the changes.
Another cool thing about making us more "productive" is that it generates a large pool of former workers who are willing to work for McDonald's wages if they can just have a chance, eventually, of getting medical coverage -- in three months after starting the job. Oh, forgot about the mighty temp pool. No medical coverage, what was I thinking.
Are we running our nation for the benefit of the 90 percent who don't really have a chance at wealth, or is it all about pleasing the wealthy, who really don't need to have the government make them happier? That's the only real question. The US answered yes to the latter. France answered yes to the former. Who's happy? Here, it's the wealthy, who are buying up the country as fast as they can; in France, the wealth are cranked that they can't be wealthier, but the people are largely happy and healthy. Pounded it home yet? Back to work.
Odd, I heard about this on NPR this morning. But before this report was a longish report about how the "business community" of France was annoyed that they weren't getting the profits they could get if the workers weren't restricted to 35 hours of non-OT work by law. Report also mentioned that by law, all workers had to get physical checkups in order to work. The report, trying to be "balanced", mentioned that actually French workers were more productive than Americans, per hour worked.
Then the report about the hamster wheel desk. No irony intended, I'm sure.
Thing about the workers with the shorter work week in France that they didn't mention? They aren't really all that overweight. Thin, actually. American workers are not. I'd have to come down on the side that would say that we're fat because all we f*ing do is work. I do fifty a week at a forty job, and get warned about even three hours of OT. Thanks jeebus I ride a bike to work during the summer, or I'd have a bypass operation by now. I'm too tired to exercise -- it't no fun when you get home at eight and all you want to do is drop into a chair, not from physical, but mental exhaustion. And no, the other jobs aren't better, all the coming anecdotes from star IT workers to the contrary.
Employer solution? Well, force me out and replace me with H1B labor, sure, or make two people do my job, which already is a composite of two people's jobs. But maybe, a Habitrail! That's the solution!
Or we can reregulate our work world and have a 35 hour week, or in reality a 40. Nah. That's communism.
But we are fat, dying too young of old men's diseases, overcharged by a factor of two for medical care for a crap lifestyle, have no free time, and are less productive and by survey a hell of a lot less happy than the French. And the French companies are by no means impoverished; they just want more profits. So they want to be more like us, eh? Alors, time to get the French Habitrail desk. I hope it has a nice winerack for lunch, at least. Another thing they can do is drink at lunch...
Senator Lieberman is effectively a Republican. He's blocking an enormous number of investigations using his position as committee chair. So, Democrats really don't have the Senate. They can't kick him out, because he'd then officially change parties and then the Demos would be well and truly buggered.
There were some hair-raising SF stories a few years back that detailed a future where copyright infringement was a federal crime punishable by death.
SF isn't a literature that tries to predict the future. SF is just looking scientifically, truthfully, at what actually happens when x changes society, rather than relying on belief that the future is always pretty much like today. And what a good, honest writer sees now is black as hell.
We're entering the corporate future. Please leave your common law rights in the basket to your left, where they will be disposed of later. All out.
We generally don't fight wars to run our power plants. Cost accounting is a tricky thing. Who is being charged what? If we charged a ten dollar a gallon Iraq War tax, then you'd internalize how much a gas car really costs. Right now we make our judgements based on a cost structure designed to finance the cost of oil from as many pockets as possible. Not to mention, how much does the gas actually cost, compared to the refinery/supply Enroning that gives the oil companies 30 billion dollars of profit every fiscal quarter?
New diesel technology has been available for years that clean up the old problems. Europe is replete with diesel cars. Detroit just doesn't like diesel. The executives are gasoline fans, always will be.
Slashdot Mirror
What's a "criminal"? Pot smokers? Drug dealers -- would they exist if you didn't make the drugs illegal in the first place? "Terrorists"? We haven't caught a single "terrorist" since the Total American Meltdown began in 2001. For one thing, the "terrorists" were in the planes, and they are dead, dead, dead. Everyone else you "caught" accused of being terrorists were either guilty by association with someone else who was guilty by association, or were fingered by some murdering thugs in Afghanistan as a "terrorist" for a fifty grand bounty. Show me one damn "terrorist" you've all found. What the hell is a "terrorist"? All we've sucked down for over six years was to protect us from the mighty hidden army of "terrorists" that you've all insisted were all around us, ready to kill in God's name. And there are none.
You catch a murderer, fine. But we've killed over 60,000 innocents to punish 19 dead men. Who catches us? We've created a massive opium market in Afghanistan which the Taliban had previously wiped out, because we installed organized crime, the "Warlords", as the government. Who arrests us for this? Caught a thief? We've literally emptied twenty billion in cash from the Iraqi treasury, loaded it onto pallets in a warehouse, and handed it out in paper bags to American-only contractors. Who's going down for that? Caught a torturer? Ditto us. Pedophile? We've stood by while kids were raped in Iraqi jails by guards.
What the supersecret American Spy System has probably found were poor people who did stupid things for money. The big criminals stole hundreds of billions from pension funds and through kickbacks and understandings from deals to downsize and outsource. But rich people never commit crimes. Only poor, insane, or stupid people do.
Professional spies don't have criminal histories. They aren't catching spooks, they're keeping people who got caught smoking weed once in McJobs for the rest of their lives. Soon enough, with laws against everything from felony thoughtcrime to felony attempted copyright infringement, the only employables will be the people who lived in gated communities where they can control the cops' access to their lives.
The real criminals are running the spook agencies, major corporations, and gigantic cults. Those bastards are never going to see the inside of a lockup.
Point taken, but I'm actually coming at it from a broad perspective. Not everyone can get off the corporate wheel, actually not possible at all. So, broad solutions for everyone, not just me.
I've been you as well. A few years ago, I hopped off for a year, rode a bike, grew strong and healthy and enjoyed life off the corporate grid for a bit. I'm back on to get health insurance for less than a thousand a month.
I can open a comic book shop or a consultancy, yes. But what about the other 90 percent who can't? We all hang together or we hang separately.
Obstruction of justice is a crime. Congress does have oversight of the hiring and firing of US Attorneys. Bush is not king, and Fox News repeatedly saying he is doesn't make it so.
Once again, if he canned prosecutors for not filing false charges of voter fraud against Democrats in close races weeks before the November election, that is fraud in and of itself. The prosecutors involved say the tit for tat was understood: kill the Democrats and live, or fail to charge and be gone. Those who chose integrity were canned.
And: knowing full well after the landslide Democratic victory that investigations were coming and US Attorneys would be filing charges should it be necessary against Bush and his people -- and he seems to know that it was a certainty, given the news the last few days about the power struggle between the Bushies and the DOJ -- he was intentionally larding up the USA's ranks with absolutely faithful Republicans known for their loyalty to Bush and his cause. This is obstruction of justice with a bullet.
"DanRathering". Find an error, any error, even if it's hypothetical, and the bulk of the rest of the evidence doesn't matter. Fixate on a detail, "falsify" it in any way possible, than homeopathically transmit that "false" datum's attributes to the rest of the data. Magic. It takes a special kind of mind to work that way. Unfortunately, most do.
If he fired them because they would not file false charges of voter fraud, or because he wanted to replace them with sure-fire Bushies who wouldn't prosecute him no matter what the Congress found, then his pleasure doesn't matter. This is why the Congress oversees the hiring and firing of US Attorneys. They do NOT serve at the President's pleasure, but at the pleasure of the Congress, ultimately. If Bush and his people can be shown to manipulate the USAs to prepare false charges against Democrats or to refuse to file charges against his people, then it's time for a special prosecutor -- tho the Special Prosecutor law ended at the end of the Clinton term, oddly enough, and wasn't renewed -- and an impeachment and conviction for obstruction of justice, at the very least. followed by removal. We can't let him run out the clock as he's doing now.
And if he did indeed knowingly start a war against innocents, then he should be shipped to the Hague for prosecution of war crimes against humanity. Stupidity or refusal to listen to contrary facts is not an excuse for murder.
GAY poor daschund puppy orphans.
I'm serious. Unlike those detention camps Kellogg, Root and Brown are building for Bush's future projects, our Dixie Gulags will be built by actual hippies. You will spend the rest of your life tending organic gardens and making clothes for poor daschund puppy orphans in Venezuela. Hell, we'll put the gulags in Cuba AND Venezuala, what you might call the DEEP Deep South. And you'll watch Barbara Streisand and Jane Fonda movies each and every night. And Phil Donohue in the mornings, of course, once we get him a new show.
You've lost. We're building the gulags in Dixie for y'all.
And if it is in there, I'd bet my nards that the twit who's accusing was the diarist, under a different handle.
And, may I add, you can't fire USA's because they refuse to file charges of fraud without suffient evidence. Charges that Rove and company wanted filed just before the election in '06.
Also, people aren't saying it out loud, so I will: the USAs were canned post-election, when Bush's coterie knew investigators were a-comin' soon. They were loading up the US Attorneys with pro-Bush people, I mean, hard-core Bushies, known to be loyal to the party come what may. This is a flavor of obstruction which is so profound we don't even have a name for it. "Fixing" the investigation by putting in your made guys.
A lot. Reports are that Junior is quite a frothing potty mouth. Aides are terrified of him.
Toyota has the patents, and now has the plans to dominate. Think: hybrids are just electric cars with gasoline engines. When batteries and capacitors become cheap and can do the entire job, the cars are ready for them. Minimum fuss.
The American executives are still muttering about hippies and horsepower. They just aren't getting it.
Greg Palast, an American working for BBC news, is of the miniscule number of investigative journalists working to open up the can of worms the last six years. He's literally a man in exile because he can't get play here in the US. He's blow open so many crimes that it's tiring to list them. I am quite sure his work finding the emails will be complete ignored.
Up 'til now, no animal breeder has developed a calf that will walk into an enclosed pen of its own free will, tenderize itself while eating rich foods, then demand that it and its mates be slaughtered in the name of the free market.
We are a special breed, we American workers.
Oops. Bad form, but to make the fourth paragraph make sense, I meant to say: hire H1B or can me and hire someone more desperate -- lots of them now -- who won't complain and won't notice, being too young to see the changes.
Another cool thing about making us more "productive" is that it generates a large pool of former workers who are willing to work for McDonald's wages if they can just have a chance, eventually, of getting medical coverage -- in three months after starting the job. Oh, forgot about the mighty temp pool. No medical coverage, what was I thinking.
Are we running our nation for the benefit of the 90 percent who don't really have a chance at wealth, or is it all about pleasing the wealthy, who really don't need to have the government make them happier? That's the only real question. The US answered yes to the latter. France answered yes to the former. Who's happy? Here, it's the wealthy, who are buying up the country as fast as they can; in France, the wealth are cranked that they can't be wealthier, but the people are largely happy and healthy. Pounded it home yet? Back to work.
Odd, I heard about this on NPR this morning. But before this report was a longish report about how the "business community" of France was annoyed that they weren't getting the profits they could get if the workers weren't restricted to 35 hours of non-OT work by law. Report also mentioned that by law, all workers had to get physical checkups in order to work. The report, trying to be "balanced", mentioned that actually French workers were more productive than Americans, per hour worked.
Then the report about the hamster wheel desk. No irony intended, I'm sure.
Thing about the workers with the shorter work week in France that they didn't mention? They aren't really all that overweight. Thin, actually. American workers are not. I'd have to come down on the side that would say that we're fat because all we f*ing do is work. I do fifty a week at a forty job, and get warned about even three hours of OT. Thanks jeebus I ride a bike to work during the summer, or I'd have a bypass operation by now. I'm too tired to exercise -- it't no fun when you get home at eight and all you want to do is drop into a chair, not from physical, but mental exhaustion. And no, the other jobs aren't better, all the coming anecdotes from star IT workers to the contrary.
Employer solution? Well, force me out and replace me with H1B labor, sure, or make two people do my job, which already is a composite of two people's jobs. But maybe, a Habitrail! That's the solution!
Or we can reregulate our work world and have a 35 hour week, or in reality a 40. Nah. That's communism.
But we are fat, dying too young of old men's diseases, overcharged by a factor of two for medical care for a crap lifestyle, have no free time, and are less productive and by survey a hell of a lot less happy than the French. And the French companies are by no means impoverished; they just want more profits. So they want to be more like us, eh? Alors, time to get the French Habitrail desk. I hope it has a nice winerack for lunch, at least. Another thing they can do is drink at lunch...
Senator Lieberman is effectively a Republican. He's blocking an enormous number of investigations using his position as committee chair. So, Democrats really don't have the Senate. They can't kick him out, because he'd then officially change parties and then the Demos would be well and truly buggered.
If we were all criminals, there'd be surveillance cameras watching our every move... oh, wait.
There were some hair-raising SF stories a few years back that detailed a future where copyright infringement was a federal crime punishable by death.
SF isn't a literature that tries to predict the future. SF is just looking scientifically, truthfully, at what actually happens when x changes society, rather than relying on belief that the future is always pretty much like today. And what a good, honest writer sees now is black as hell.
We're entering the corporate future. Please leave your common law rights in the basket to your left, where they will be disposed of later. All out.
Someday we will see someone on death row for copying music. People will acclimate to anything.
We generally don't fight wars to run our power plants. Cost accounting is a tricky thing. Who is being charged what? If we charged a ten dollar a gallon Iraq War tax, then you'd internalize how much a gas car really costs. Right now we make our judgements based on a cost structure designed to finance the cost of oil from as many pockets as possible. Not to mention, how much does the gas actually cost, compared to the refinery/supply Enroning that gives the oil companies 30 billion dollars of profit every fiscal quarter?
Gas engines are inefficent, and making them bigger and badder always wastes fuel.
If you want a fast takeoff that doesn't waste power, you want an electric car.
Do they, and you, factor in hilly terrain? Flatlanders will get better mpg than San Franciscans, for example.
New diesel technology has been available for years that clean up the old problems. Europe is replete with diesel cars. Detroit just doesn't like diesel. The executives are gasoline fans, always will be.