JackRiddler
JackRiddler's JournalThe world exists to convenience drivers.
Bikers are not legitimate participants in traffic. They are hobbyists who create a nuisance. Countries are bombed and peoples are murdered, forests are cleared and edens are paved, cities are choked in smoke and stress and a planet is burned so that drivers can have their precious metal boxes and the necessary fuel at an affordable cost.
After this greatest of all human achievements, now some do-gooders are seriously saying drivers should accept the humiliation of sharing roads with bikers who ride at only 15 mph at most. Many of these biking anarchists don't have the decency to make space by throwing themselves into a ditch every time a metal box appears behind them and wants to go through. Those people should use "less busy" roads, which is to say - roads that do not exist. Bikers should cease to exist!
"Just"
Like the U.S. isn't neck-deep in the Mexican drug war, which is utterly corrupt and has killed tens of thousands.
Like there's no industrial espionage involved.
Dream on, FOXNEWS.
Damn that Greenwald, how dare he...
have the most basic idea of how to time his story releases for maximum impact? How dare he upset the Hon. Secretary's all-important unprecedented trip to Paris? How dare he use a French paper to do it? French, I tell you! It's not as though anyone has a legitimate interest in this story, otherwise!
An honorable man would have published it by hand-printing the story under the Rock of Gibraltar, on Christmas Day during a snowstorm while the power was out. And only after vetting it with the NSA and CIA, and turning himself and his sources in to the FBI for a thorough investigation. Oh woe, why didn't a real journalist get this story, to do it right?
Clinton voted for the war of aggression in 2003.
How about some interviews with all those dead Iraqis for whom she, too, is responsible? Oh wait, they can't be interviewed!
The yeah-votes from Clinton and certain other leading Democrats were essential to rallying the nation behind the war of aggression just long enough to initiate it. That doesn't make them primary architects of this unpunished crime against humanity (like Cheney-Rumsfeld et al.) but their function in starting the war was at least as vital as that of the Bush regime's PR front personnel (Powell and Rice). Any "opposition" they developed after the carnage became self-perpetuating and the war turned unpopular doesn't count, sorry.
Can you name a war that the U.S. went on to wage that Hillary Clinton opposed before it started, when her opposition might actually have made a difference? Not even true of Vietnam, because when that got started she worked for Goldwater.
Edward Snowden - closer to hero or bad actor?
If "hero" is one extreme and "bad actor" is the other, where would you place Edward Snowden after his recent actions to expose top secret U.S. government programs? Bad actor would mean that what he did wasn't a good thing, whatever the intent may have been. (Note that DU automatically gives a "pass" option.)
After voting, be sure to watch this story today on Democracy Now!
Ex-NSA CIA, FBI and Justice Whistleblowers Meet Leaker in Moscow
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/14/edward_snowden_is_a_patriot_ex
Columbus and Galileo (belated 10/12 post)
What myths we make! Columbus didn't get it right that the world was round. This was well-known in Europe at the time. He got it wrong, claiming the Earth was much smaller than the roughly correct measurements of its circumference dating back to Ptolemaic Egypt. He sold the Spanish monarchs on his small-earth theory, making them think it was easier than anyone believed to reach China by going westward from Spain, and so got his expedition financed.
Then he ran into the unexpected continents in between Europe and Asia. This was lucky for him, because otherwise his crews would have starved for food before making even half the way to China - that is, if a mutiny didn't throw him overboard first. And so Colon (the name he actually used) became the first conquistador in the Americas, not a hero but a mass murderer and a tyrant even by his own accounts. Howard Zinn tells this tragic story powerfully in the first chapter of A People's History of the United States.
It's sad that Italian-Americans have adopted Columbus as the figure for their well-earned ethnic holiday in the United States. Once established, this is almost impossible to change. What figure from Italy has anything like the name recognition required to replace Columbus for the Italian holiday? It would have to be someone with the world-historical stature of a Newton, or a Galileo. The mind credited with originating the modern scientific method would be a genuinely worthy and universal hero to celebrate, so it's too bad Galileo was French, right?
How about the Federal Reserve just retires a trillion in U.S. debt?
Unfortunately I can't get the graphic from St. Louis Fed at http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FDHBFRBN to display here, so follow link. It shows T-bills held by Federal Reserve banks. Thanks to QE and other programs, the amount has gone up from 800 billion in 2008 to almost 2 trillion today. The Fed created money to buy these from the financial sector in the various QE programs, as a means of pumping money into the sector. The economic impact may have been negligible, but the world didn't end. So now it holds 2 trillion in U.S. debt. How about it just retires a trillion this week?
Voila.
This supposed U.S. debt crisis is manufactured. Close to half of the debt is held in the S.S. and Medicare trust funds and by the Federal Reserve. The government has the liabilities to pay S.S. in the future, but to call this debt is a matter of accounting.
Greenwald: Approve or Disapprove?
As a whole and on balance, have the works of Glenn Greenwald in the last few years been...
ON EDIT: Added "Not of great impact" as an option. (At that point there were 40 votes: 27 "Good" for both, 12 "Bad" for both, 1 pass.)
Let's be clear, it's not policy, it's a criminal case.
And a long overdue one. Of course it is also policy in the sense that the N.D. government is playing it as a shift to grab the center while reabsorbing the G.D. vote.
You are consistently missing what happened, however, when you write: "The government moved on them after the murder because it was politically convenient, not because they give a damn." I don't agree at all. I refuse to downplay the role of the people. The government was forced by the popular response and the revelations to act. The latter provided the evidence of a criminal organization engaged in multiple assaults and killings.
That is what made it "politically convenient." It could have brought them down, in combination with the rest of the Greek situation. This government has been unstable during its entire tenure, just like the last two Greek governments. (They lost one junior partner in June and barely have a majority, with PASOK possibly in its final death throes.)
Of course the government doesn't give a damn! This is a victory of the people. Forced to act, the government is now claiming full ownership of it as policy, acting with vigor and playing the game to their advantage without scruples. This is to be expected from a fairly canny and authoritarian government that was already playing political "shock and awe" in their other policies (immigrant concentration camps, ERT shutdown, forced-work orders on strikers, arrests of journalists demanding their sources, etc.).
My "approval of the arrests" does not rest on the idea that justice will be done. It may not be, unfortunately. The arrests were something that should have started happening several murders ago. These are not just scumbags with an ugly line, they were planning and executing murders on the street.
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