Obama in China

Obama goes to China - and delivers a townhall. I find it terribly funny that he's out there preaching about how free and wonderful the internet is, when he's busy negotiating secret WIPO treaties that are the antithesis of his spew. Then again - i suppose that's how government works... if you're an evil blood-crazed warmonger you join a thinktank with Peace in the name. It's one thing to have the freedom to tell the president he's a jackass... it's another for him to care and do something about being a jackass. If he's going to be a jackass anyway - if all the bitching people do amounts to something that he just sits back and laughs about - then how much more valuable is that freedom than knowing Demi Moore is on the toilet.

Happy monday.

Airport Security Upgrade

These british made bomb detectors work so well they should replace metal detectors and xrays in all american airports.... but no... obviously the pro-xray lobby and anti-british lobby must have it out for these guys.

"Proponents of the wand often argue that errors stem from the human operator, who they say must be rested, with a steady pulse and body temperature, before using the device.

Then the operator must walk in place a few moments to “charge” the device, since it has no battery or other power source, and walk with the wand at right angles to the body. If there are explosives or drugs to the operator’s left, the wand is supposed to swivel to the operator’s left and point at them.

If, as often happens, no explosives or weapons are found, the police may blame a false positive on other things found in the car, like perfume, air fresheners or gold fillings in the driver’s teeth."

See - we just have to make sure passengers arent wearing perfume... or have gold fillings.

(if you want to know how the executives at this company sleep at night, my guess is 'very very well')

One Year Later

It's been a year... a year since the election of our first black president... a progressive, dedicated to change - changing the way government worked - making america great again.

What do we have.
Gitmo is still doing business as usual.
AT&T is shielded from lawsuits.
All those pictures taken by the military during the Bush administration are shielded from FOIA requests by law.
The new healthcare bill has provisions in it restricting access to abortion and paying government money for prayer treatments.
The administration has cut deals with big pharma promising not to use the leverage of the govt to cut costs on prescription medication.
They didnt even push for a public option in the health care legislation - and the one that's there is a shell - and even then the thing seems unlikely to pass.
Billions and billions have been thrown to the rich - funneled through failed corporate behemoths in such a way that the american taxpayer gets absolutely nothing in return - all the while NONE of the fundamental causes of the economic collapse have even begun to be addressed.
We're still in Iraq.
We've added more troops to Afghanistan - and we're supporting a president there who rigged his election so badly that it makes the shenanigans from Florida 2000 look like pop warner. (or as the esteemed Mr Cole put it recently - "Hamid Karzai has been declared the winner of the Afghanistan presidential contest by the misnamed Independent Electoral Commission, the local Afghan commission appointed by . . . Hamid Karzai.")
And now the president is negotiating a treaty - in secret - where the details of said treaty are only leaking out - whereby children who copy music from their dvds to their ipods may face criminal prosecution and prison time.

The president is a jackass. If we're going to have an asshole as president it might as well be a republican.

Those of you who defend him because 'he's one of us' - screw you.

oh yeah

a reminder

our president is an assclown

i hope to god the republicans take a shit all over this son of a bitch and gridlock the government all to hell...

hrm

ok - so anyone that's listened to me weigh in on this whole collapse thing over the past year has seen me go off on these sorts of alarm bells before... but i was reading this last week and now this this week and the combination just doesn't feel like we have very good chances. This dead cat bounce economy, rising oil prices, a rising unemployment rate, and governmental impotence in the face of catastrophic forces seems to be leading us all to a very bad place.

Ah well, at least i have chicken.

Maybe if we pray for the economy it'll get better.

mondays are for posts

like this

but what do you expect - we're a nation of idiots

not a headline i'd ever expect to see

but what an amazing story

hmmm

There are a couple ways to look at this story.

First there's the tragic... a bunch of unaware french soldiers got killed for no reason here. I mean - we knew Berlusconi and the Italians were into paying people off for preferred outcomes - look at AC Milan. But getting people killed?

Still - i find it interesting. Iraq was a nightmare until we started paying insurgents a couple hundred bucks a month... Afghanistan is apparently a powderkeg unless you drop a couple thousand dollars... I wonder... cant we just give bin laden a rolex and tell him to piss off? Sure there's a line... apparently we draw it at $2m (ask Letterman)... and sure it's morally reprehensible - but so is the only realistic way of solving the problem (aka genocide).

Rolling Stone?

So in a day where Fox is merely an outlet for Randian Nutjobbery - why not have a music magazine tossing around projected government costs and breaking out detailed advantages of government run healthcare?
Taibbi has had interesting things to say before, but this one is just so simple. The more I look at the abomination that is the Baucus bill the more i hope the damned thing fails - so we can go back to the drawing board and maybe approach a real solution instead. Then again - these are facts... and we all know how Americans deal with those...

gah

typical

"Archimedes wrote his manuscript on a papyrus scroll 2,200 years ago. At an unknown later time, someone copied the text from papyrus to animal-skin parchment. Then, 700 years ago, a monk needed parchment for a new prayer book. He pulled the copy of Archimedes' book off the shelf, cut the pages in half, rotated them 90 degrees, and scraped the surface to remove the ink, creating a palimpsest—fresh writing material made by clearing away older text."

So typical... erase the beginnings of calculus so you can spew about zombie jeebus. there are days the religious make me sick to my stomach.

at 6:36 this morning

i watched nasa crash 2 spaceships into the moon

unfortunately - the images sent back didnt reveal the vast sub-lunar kingdom of insect-people. I was disappointed.

Oh yeah... and Obama won the nobel peace prize.

So i guess between that and nasa proving the moon isnt made of cheese the Anallubicans will be exploding this morning.

every time i think...

that politicians are just an absolute waste of time

There are 2 salient points... does a binding arbitrator saying 'here's a dollar, you must now keep silent' count towards the cited statistics of employee success? -- and why the hell isnt a crime as egregious as this an exception to their arbitration rule. I understand the idea that we dont want to clog the courts with a legion of small claim settlement cases - that is certainly in everyone's best interest - but how the hell can a case like the one we're looking at in Franken's example here end up behind closed doors? Of course it's KBR... what do you expect.

ahhh

good to see we're learning creatures

this whole situation is bad enough without people making it worse... but no... idiots
Obama had the chance to lead on this... to push through some real change to 'business as usual' rather than offer platitudes as to how things were different. Yeah. That's pretty much the only change he managed... and it's worth about 2 cents.

Our president is either woefully stupid or complicit.

Just be glad

because when i give you a happy monday story i'm at least giving you a unicorn chaser to follow it up

The Olympics

So Chicago lost out - and we're supposed to be upset...
instead - i'm rather happy about it. What the hell does America have that it should be so proud as to want to show it off to the world? London is going to blow 15 billion dollars on the 2012 games - so instead how about we spend the 15b on something like, oh i dont know, the education system so we can get more than 0/1000 hs graduates able to get 7/10 questions right on the US Citizenship test?

Priorities people...

At least China had something worth showing off. What do we have... Teabaggers? A stellar justice system? Maybe it's the way we lead the world to a panacea of capitalist bliss?