Pollywogs!

So I’ve been thinking a lot recently. I guess that is normal, but instead of water off a ducks back it seems I feel pretty disturbed. I’ve also tried specifically not thinking, but that is surprisingly difficult to do. So, to help me more than for your own enjoyment or elucidation, here are a couple things that have been bothering me lately…

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On the distribution of wealth. Or, George Bush is a fucking dickhead and not only needs impeached, but he needs tried for his crimes.

“In his State of the Union, the President asked Congress for $300 million for poor kids in the inner city. As there are, officially, 15 million children in America living in poverty, how much is that per child? Correct! $20.

Here’s your second question. The President also demanded that Congress extend his tax cuts. The cost: $4.3 trillion over ten years. The big recipients are millionaires. And the number of millionaires happens, not coincidentally, to equal the number of poor kids, roughly 15 million of them. OK class: what is the cost of the tax cut per millionaire? That’s right, Richie, $287,000 apiece.”

Perhaps the idea behind this is that the wealth will trickle down. We’ve seen how well this works. Wealth trickles down to us, and then the rich take it right back to bail out investment banks who were specifically separated by law from consumer banks due to a gigantic fuck up in the past to prevent their failures from impacting the public. A tidy arraignment.

The disconnect is so severe, and the need for a change in attitude so pressing, it makes me just want to leave the fucking country behind and let it burn.

“Four of the biggest U.S. investment banks — Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos. — will pay out about $49.6 billion US in compensation this year. Of that, bonuses are traditionally estimated to represent 60 per cent, or almost $30 billion US.

But that might not sit well with investors who held onto investment bank stocks this year — and watched them plunge by as much as 45 per cent. Investment houses have been slammed by the credit crisis and top executives this last week said they’ve yet to see a bottom.”

Yes. That is right, the executive compensation for a company where the stock dived from $160 a share to $2 a share is avery healthy quarter billion over the past decade, thank you. Coincidentally not much less than the entire company was sold for just after he got out.

Corporate fucking welfare. Let us change the dialog. Put the good of the people first, not the good of the elite few. Fuck corporate welfare…

“The current financial crisis may determine much more than which political party occupies the White House in 2009 — it could (and may already have) remake the zeitgeist. The Great Depression of the 1930s spawned the New Deal. Will the Great Credit Crunch of today potentially restructure how government, the financial markets and the general welfare intersect?

Only if we really want it to. New York Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has been telling us for years that the policy pendulum is finally swinging in the other direction. Liberalism is no longer a dirty word, he thunders; it’s high time for government to get back in the business of governing. He might be right. As we review the wreckage created by Wall Street’s finest minds, it is tempting to entertain the possibility that the impulse to deregulate and privatize and “trust” markets to be their own best guardian — that epochal re-imagining of government launched by Ronald Reagan — has finally run its course.”

This is probably the article I would have written about this mess if I had talent and ability.

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Do you remember when the cocksuckers in the Bush Administration said “No one could have predicted the strength of the insurgency” when trying to excuse away their supremely criminal and intentional negligence when it came to Iraq (and 9/11 incidentally)? Guess what. No only did someone predict it (besides the millions and millions of people around the world who protested before the Iraq war), that someone was THE FUCKING ARMY THEMSELVES.

“Iraq presents far from ideal conditions for achieving strategic goals. Saddam Hussein is the culmination of a violent political culture that is rooted in a tortured history. Ethnic, tribal, and religious schisms could produce civil war or fracture the state after Saddam is deposed. The Iraqi Army may be useful as a symbol of national unity, but it will take extensive reeducation and reorganization to operate in a more democratic state. Years of sanctions have debilitated the economy and created a society dependent on the UN Oil for Food Program. Rebuilding Iraq will require a considerable commitment of American resources, but the longer U.S. presence is maintained, the more likely violent resistance will develop.

The monograph concludes by developing and describing a phased array of tasks that must be accomplished to create and sustain a viable state. The 135 tasks are organized into 21 categories, and rated as “essential,” “critical,” or “important” for the commander of coalition military forces. They are then projected across four phases of transition— Security, Stabilize, Build Institutions, and Handover/ Redeploy—to reflect which governmental, nongovernmental, and international organizations will be involved in execution during each phase.”

Just like the Bush Administration listens to the generals on the ground (until they disagree and are fired/resign), the Bush Administration listens to intelligence until the point that it says something they do not want to hear. At which point they lie and continue doing what they were planning on doing the whole time.

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Jack who? Oh, that happened more than two days ago, right down the memory hole…

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The FCC, a tool of the Bush administration and the elite, just like everything else they have touched, corrupted and putrescent.

“It appears that a critical mass of FCC grunts are sick of what they experience as a super-politicized work life in which just about anything that they want to do has to get the go-ahead from the top, that being Kevin Martin. “Nothing happens in the Commission without the approval of the Chairman’s office,” my source told me. “It is incredible. We have become so political.”

Do you have any sense of the logic of these directives from the Chair? I asked. “Nope,” came the reply. “It seems as random as he got up this morning and ate his breakfast and just decided to do it.”

Why are FCC employees upset about this? Not because they disagree with Kevin Martin’s perspective on this or that FCC issue, but because, according to my source, he and his top subordinates demand that staff skip proper procedures and leapfrog various rules, even Congressional mandated rules, on a day-to-day level.

…The most formidable whistle blower I’ve encountered is former FCC attorney and now law professor Adam Candeub. Two years ago Candeub straight out told the press that a report arguing that locally owned TV stations broadcast more local news “was stopped in its tracks because it was not the way the agency wanted to go.” The study’s conclusions obviously implied that retaining some of the FCC’s media ownership caps might help those local TV stations survive.”

What happens when all of the decent and honest people are forced out of the government? Oh wait, I’ve read that book before…

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You could say I’m feeling a little discouraged. I’m feeling a little disappointed. I’m feeling the same rage and hatred against ignorance, willful negligence and reckless greed and avarice that I felt as a young child, tempered with the adults knowledge that all I am directly opposed by a titanic inertia. Hope, broken. Dreams, smashed. Yes, what they sing is true: despite all my rage I’m still just a rat in a cage.

I guess in time I’ll come to accept the fact that this generation is not the generation that will change things? That this generation is not the one that is going to wake from our pacified slumber and realize that by merely deciding it will be so, we could change existence for the better?

Until we’ve made that conscious choice as a people (and by people I mean humans the world over), we’re treading water here. As much as I hesitate to sound New Age, I recognize that for mankind to continue to thrive and improve we are going to have to change the way we operate in a fundamental fashion. Until we put the thoughts into words, the words into possibility, it simply exists as a dream does, ethereal and insubstantial.

The analogy of the human people and their (rather, our) societies as an individual growing up comes back to me, over and over. We are just now shaking off the nightmare of our childhood, and yet we still have so very far to go to become mature and responsible. We show moments of greatness and then relapse into our infantile ways. We truly are at a crux, our potential paths leading down so many different roads; the future, ahead and unknown…

You grab the low fruit while considering how to get at the high fruit. We need some immediate and basic corrections. Obama will do for now (hopefully quite well) as there are so many obvious problems that need corrected he should keep quite busy grabbing that low fruit over the next four years. I hope he does very well. However, I fear that Bush has taken a chainsaw to the apple tree…as gin-stained tears run down my nose, will I learn to love Big Brother?

I’ve been looking for some interesting material which will cause people to become curious about the Democrat candidates, and I think I’ve found it.

The Democratic take from top to bottom

“What’s rocking the boat? The Internet, mostly. Every day, it seems, the Web provides another way for average citizens to be active in the political process, instead of having the effects of politics trickle down to them…

As proof, Mr. Trippi points to the disparities between donations to the Clinton and Obama campaigns. Only 10 percent of Clinton contributors did not donate the legal maximum $2,300 for her primary campaign. In contrast, only three percent of Obama donors gave the maximum. The rest of the cash came from small sums from many more people.”

90% of Clinton contributions come from people so rich they can throw away $2,300 on a campaign contribution.

3% of Obama contributions come from people so rich they can throw away $2,300 on a campaign contribution.

Among the questions raised include “Who is the establishment candidate?” and “What do the rich know about Clinton that they lavish so much money upon her?”: Who do the elite and powerful think is going to best support their special interest?

If you’d like to see some of their records in congress, I suggest this highly educational (if a bit wordy) examination of the bills they’ve authored and/or sponsored (much more telling than their voting or co-sponsor records).

Forbes Magazine is filled with some of the most vile shit I’ve read recently. And some of the most misinformed (see Poisoned Bulbs). Does Steve Forbes, the fucking retard, think that florescent bulbs are a new invention? That people haven’t had them installed in their homes for decades upon decades now? That bulbs haven’t been breaking the entire time?

Folks trust Forbes when they can’t even do the most basic research on a topic (much less one that was thoroughly debunked a couple months ago)?

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You can fit an 8′ baseboard heater in a Prius up between the two front seats. If you put the passenger seat down in the front, you could bring home a stack of 2×4s.

Speaking of baseboard heaters, an 8′ current costs about $70. The end caps cost $11 each. When I picked up the pieces in Lowes and saw the price, I literally dropped the F-bomb right then and there. Ahh, the familiar burning sensation of getting raped in the ass. Wonderful…

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Vote fraud? Rigged elections? What do you think this is, some Banana Republic??

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So it looks like the rest of the world is finally starting to wrestle with the realization that the United States is spinning out of control with a madman who does not give a fuck at the wheel. Global markets are in decline, the US markets are down 10-15% (actually back to about the same levels they were spring of 2007), and the Fed is clutching at straws trying to ‘prevent a recession’. Record deficit spending, tax cuts, a dollar which has been losing value faster than they can print new bills…

But don’t worry, the rich are doing just fine. Look at ExxonMobile. Most profitable company in the history of mankind last year. You aren’t getting gouged at the pump though, they are making those astronomical profits fair and square. You can trust them. Just like the media.

Speaking of trust, the White House has been doing whatever they can to incite war with Iran. And FUCKING CONGRESS is helping them. Stupid, worthless piles of shit. When will we wake up and remember that the Public is in control of this Republic, not criminals and cunts who we ‘elected’ to a temporary position of representation. FUCK. You can’t tell, but that fuck was filled with as much contempt and derision as possible. The kind of contempt which makes you huck a rock at a corpse hanging at a gas station. The same kind of contempt the White House has for “We the People of the United States“:

“The White House “does not know if any e-mails were not properly preserved in the archiving process,” said the statement by Theresa Payton, chief information officer for the White House Office of Administration. “We are continuing our efforts,” said Payton, whose staff is responsible for the White House e-mail system.

If the e-mails were not saved, the White House might have violated two laws requiring preservation of documents that fall into the categories of federal records or presidential records.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said that “there is no basis to say that the White House has destroyed any evidence or engaged in any misconduct.”

No basis? Really?

And just in case you had any delusions that this isn’t the New Fascist Republic of America, please re-read the definition of fascism and keep in mind the policies of the last seven years which have stripped the heart out of the Constitution:

“Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology (generally tied to a mass movement) that considers individual subordinate to the interests of the state, party or society as a whole. Fascists seek to forge a type of national unity, usually based on (but not limited to) ethnic, cultural, racial, religious attributes. The key attribute is intolerance of others: other religions, languages, political views, economic systems, cultural practices, etc. Various scholars attribute different characteristics to fascism, but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: nationalism, statism, militarism, totalitarianism, anti-communism, corporatism, populism, collectivism, and opposition to political and economic liberalism.”

Yes. The government is suddenly more important than the people? Since when, again? Oh yea, since the New Pearl Harbor…

Mission Accomplished!

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2012. The first year the Northern Artic will be ice free, based on the latest data. Global what?

“This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: “At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions.”

So scientists in recent days have been asking themselves these questions: Was the record melt seen all over the Arctic in 2007 a blip amid relentless and steady warming? Or has everything sped up to a new climate cycle that goes beyond the worst case scenarios presented by computer models?”

Oh. Thank goodness. See, no one actually KNOWS. That is the great thing about science, we can just pretend it is all ok by saying that it isn’t a fact that it is our direct fault the world in ten or twenty years is going to look nothing like the world of today. “How could we know it would be so bad, no one told us, we were helpless to change, it wasn’t our fault” and all the other bullshit that will be paraded out…

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This is an interesting compare and contrast between the “US and Iraq” and “China and the US”.

“It’s been eight years now. Eight long years. Sure, initially I was glad when China toppled the Bush regime and executed the “retarded tyrant” as I love to call him. It wasn’t that bad at the start, but as time wore on and I realized they weren’t leaving, it started to gnaw at me.”

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Here is an organization I’ve become a member of recently, because of this article:

“Days before the first presidential caucuses in a medical marijuana state, the Marijuana Policy Project today doubled its offer to presidential candidates Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney to back up their statements opposing medical marijuana with scientific evidence. If any of the candidates can prove his statements are true, MPP will donate the legal maximum of $10,000 to his campaign ($5,000 for the primaries, $5,000 for the general election), plus an additional $10,000 donation to the candidate’s favorite charity.”

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Don’t use the your cell phone before bed. Seriously, no lulz here:

‘Published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Progress in Electromagnetics Research Symposium and funded by the Mobile Manufacturers Forum, representing the main handset companies, it has caused serious concern among top sleep experts, one of whom said that there was now “more than sufficient evidence” to show that the radiation “affects deep sleep”……The people who had received the radiation took longer to enter the first of the deeper stages of sleep, and spent less time in the deepest one. The scientists concluded: “The study indicates that during laboratory exposure to 884 MHz wireless signals, components of sleep believed to be important for recovery from daily wear and tear are adversely affected.”‘

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A hacker group declares war on the ‘church’ of scientology. Can fucking Tom Cruise get any crazier or creepier? And how about the brainwashed Katie Holmes? If either of them actually mattered in this current clusterfuck of existence, it would be sorta sad. As it stands, they are the latest flavor to distract and numb you of the truth of the situation.

Ignore the man behind the curtain…

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Finally, on a slightly lighter note, a roundabout literally from hell…

A mini-Reddit Roundup!!

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http://www.alternet.org/stories/72539/

“Long’s lack of humility has probably done him no favors. At the time, U.S. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), expressed dismay.

“When I hear about leaders of charities being provided a $300,000 Bentley to drive around in, my fear is that it’s the taxpayers who subsidize this charity who are really being taken for a ride,” he quipped.

In November, Grassley, who serves as ranking minority member on the Senate Finance Committee, ramped things up a bit. He announced that he is seeking detailed financial information from six mega-ministries, Long’s among them.”

Baby Jesus Fucking Christ it is about time! Oh, and some things that make you want to reconsider eugenics…

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I hate that asking questions and demanding truth and transparency brands you a conspiracy theorist, but apparently there are a couple people in our armed forces who are ‘whatever slanderous thing you call people who simply want the truth’. Twenty-five of them, to be precise.

More traitors in the military giving aid to terrorists…you’re either with us or against us, the decider has spoken…

How about some traitors in our intelligence agencies? Toe the party line folks, we have an agenda to carry out here, everyone on the same page…

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Fighting the man, Wesley Snipes style…

“Tax specialists and lawyers say that the Snipes case hinges on whether he can persuade jurors that he sincerely believed that he did not have to pay taxes, while prosecutors will argue that he was just trying to avoid them. The Supreme Court has ruled that people can make such an argument, but two leading defense lawyers said that Mr. Snipes might have a hard time using it as a defense.”

Odd, huh?

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The man fighting you. Very unfortunately so. Liberty and justice for all? I’m more disgusted by this country by the moment.

“Jones was hired at age 19 to work for Halliburton in Houston, Texas, and the next year was sent to Iraq to work for Halliburton. She says that she was drugged and raped by numerous coworkers in Baghdad, and was then confined by Halliburton armed guards to a shipping container, denied food, water, or medical help.

Jones used a borrowed cell phone to contact her father, who in turn contacted Representative Ted Poe (R, TX) who contacted the State Department, which freed Jones from Halliburton’s shipping container. U.S. Army doctors performed an examination that discovered evidence of vaginal and anal rape, but the sexual assault kit disappeared after being turned over to Halliburton and was later recovered missing some pieces of evidence, including doctor’s notes and photographs of Jones’ bruises.”

What the hell is wrong with each and every one of the god damn douche bags involved in this crime heaped upon crime heaped upon crime???

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