truedelphi
truedelphi's JournalI think that I finally have heard such an over the top idea from another DU'er
That I am left confabulated, overwhelmed, or maybe simply WHELMED?
In another post made today, I stated how awful it is that here in the USA, very little was done by this Administration in terms of helping the Middle Class. I went on to detail how in Iceland, the bankers who corrupted the economic scenario and then imploded the Icelandic economy were jailed. While our bankers were bailed out.
I went on to say: Here we let our bankers go, continued a policy of no taxation for the rich (Obama extended the "Bush tax cuts"
and tomorrow or next week or next year, the entire economy could melt down once again. And our middle class is hurting, but once again, we would be bailing those bastards on Wall Street out. Prices of food are out of sight, but as long as Safeway has "Buy one 800 ounce container of soda pop and get 30 bottles free," the economic index is screwed and doesn't measure the real inflation most of us who are not living on soda pop see every day of the week. (Things I buy are 75 cents more expensive than they were in the Spring of 2014.)
Now I expectd the usual defense: "The mean and horrid Republicans, why they just wouldn't let Obama or Holder do that."
But I got this instead: (Verbatim reply) :
Well mr. prez
if you were in Iceland you might be right, but here, IF Obama jailed any bankers of note or tried, he would be where Jack Kennedy ended up, with a fucking bullet in his head. Go tell your garbage to someone who can change this system and stop complaining about a POTUS who's done a lot for a lot of people. No, he couldn't live up to all the promises he made, NO politician in this system ever has or ever will. They are limited by this system and when you add a bunch of hateful people grinding against him, both R and D, he never stood a chance. Wake up and look at reality and the american system. Money rules, not principle, ethics or promises. MONEY!!!! Obama and NO POTUS, will ever change that.
I'd be willing to bet if a republican was in office, those items you're paying more for now than in september would be double that .75cents.
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So is this now the meme we have to believe -- that the elected Democrats would be shot and killed if they should actually attempt to make things okay for the middle class? So okay, if that is the case, then what is the friggin' point of going to the polls?
The above meme is hardly a "Get Out The Vote" type of meme. It is more like a "stay at home and hope the corruption doesn't end up with you and your whole family being carted off in the middle of the night" philosophy.
Because what is being described is a damn banana republic, and in that scenario, people do get rounded up and carted off in the middle of the night!
MY aren't we special? After all, inter galactic avengers are a dime a dozen,
And every single day of the week, we have dozens of headlines, Tweets, and FB posts regarding how inter galactic avengers have taken out dozens of domestic abusers.
Maybe we could put together an OP about the dangers of inter galactic avengers? To prove just how celebratory we women opposed to domestic violence should be?
But in the real world, these are the facts:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/06/us/domestic-intimate-partner-violence-fast-facts/
United States:
Each minute - Twenty-four people are victims of intimate partner violence, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Each day - Three or more women are murdered by their boyfriends or husbands on average, according to the American Psychology Association.
Each month - The National Domestic Violence Hotline receives an average of 22,000 calls.
Each year - Over 12 million women and men are victims of intimate partner violence, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
U.S. deaths 1980-2008 (from the Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics)
Overall - Almost one out of five or 16.3% of murder victims were killed by an intimate partner.
Women - Women account for two out of three murder victims killed by an intimate partner. The number of women killed by an intimate partner fell from 43% in 1980 to 38% in 1995, but rose to 45% in 2008.
Men - The number of men killed by an intimate partner fell from 10.4% in 1980 to 4.98% in 2008.
Using a phone to do political phone banking - NSA revelations should concern you
As the election day nears, many of us at Du are doing phone banking. One way we can contribute to whatever cause or person we deem worthy of our efforts is by doing phone banking.
Ten years ago, this meant meeting up inside a campaign office and using the candidate's phones. But these days, more and more of us are using our own phones, while we lounge on our comfy family room couch or sit in the backyard, weather permitting.
But in calling hundreds of phone numbers, we make it more likely that we inadvertently will hit a number that is now being monitered by the NSA. This puts us those "six degrees from Kevin Bacon" except it is not Kevin Bacon I am worried about, but what happens to you when you dial the ph number for Rasheed Navi Sumar, and it turns out that individual is being watched by the NSA.
Now you are among his phone contacts, and that allows the NSA to follow YOU! (And you may not even be trying to call that person's phone, as the name on the list you're trying to reach is Mary O'Brien's, but when Mary's home was foreclosed four years ago, she quit payng for her phone, and now Rasheed has her number.)
The TV show "The Good Wife" had several plots based on these notions. Alicia Florrick tried very hard to help a young woman in trouble with immigration. That young woman happened to be of Middle Eastern decent, and she was related to an indiviudal on the NSA watch list. So in making several calls to this young woman, Alicia now became a target of the NSA. And so, when one of ALiia's other clients, a king pin in the drug trade, needed to talk to Alicia, his conversations were noted by the NSA, and now they could legitimately follow him as well.
Recently EFF has had a column up and running about other insidious business in light of what Greenwald has had to say in his book about the NSA:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/how-nsa-transforming-law-enforcement
The NSA’s role in ordinary investigations is not new information. But every document that expands on the NSA’s involvement in anything domestic, and not national security related, should ring alarm bells for everyone in the United States. We know now that:
The NSA data is fed to the Drug Enforcement Agency’s “Special Operations Division.” The DEA in turn uses this information in ordinary investigations, while cloaking the source– even from judges and prosecutors.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorized the NSA to share unminimized data with the FBI, as well as the CIA, with the “Raw Take” order. Prior to this “agencies [had] to 'minimize' private information about Americans — deleting data that is irrelevant for intelligence purposes before providing it to others.”
Information sharing between the FBI, NSA, and CIA has been routinized through “software which would automatically gather a list of tasked PRISM selectors every two weeks to provide to the FBI and CIA.” (slide31.jpg). Similarly, the NSA sends “operational PRISM news and guidance to the FBI and CIA so that their analysts could task the PRISM system properly, be aware of outages and changes, and optimize their use of PRISM.”
And, most recently, we learned that the NSA partners with the DEA to record nearly all cell phone calls in the Bahamas– but not for national security purposes. This surveillance helps “to locate ‘international narcotics traffickers and special-interest alien smugglers’—traditional law-enforcement concerns, but a far cry from derailing terror plots or intercepting weapons of mass destruction.” In fact, a 2004 memo discusses the NSA’s integral role in the war on drugs.
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There is much other decent information contained by going to the link above.
My father, the Catholic nuns, and Nazis - Chicago, 1961
A long time ago, in Chicago, circa early 1960's, a forty something dad explained something important to his nine year old daughter.
At the usual time, and usual place, she had waited like she often did, for his commuter train to arrive. When he finally got off the train and walked toward her, she had run up to him exclaiming "Daddy! Daddy! You are my hero. The nuns say you American soldiers were so very brave, and you stopped the Nazis, and they were all war criminals."
The man fell silent. Very silent. he looked stern. He was so sternly quiet that for a moment the young girl thought that he might hit her. (Something that he had never done before in his life.)
Then in a very gentle voice he asked her, "How can anyone in their right mind tell you kids such nonsense? The people in Germany had lost their nation to the thugs that often get to run things when there isn't a democracy. And the difference between the US soldiers and the German soldiers was that the German soldiers had been fighting in wars since 1937 - a long time spanning eight years. While we Americans had only been fighting in Germany for less than twelve months."
He paused, still looking more concerned than usual.
"The longer a war goes on, the more likely the soldiers will be de-humanized. Over time, inside war, fewer and fewer things matter. If your closest friends are killed, your moral sense goes missing. You feel like you could take out an entire village, even if the people in that village are not at fault.
"Soldiers over time become barbaric. It is simply human nature." He again paused. "And if this nation ever falls into the hands of such thugs, then the same thing will be true of our soldiers."
Then being a wise and gentle man, in the presence of a mere nine year old, he changed the subject to topics of a more lightweight nature, like her playmates, and the animal books she had him read to her. (Although she was long past the time when she couldn't read herself.)
################
That era was not a perfect time, although as it was so long ago, I often feel nostalgic for it.
To be tucked in at night! To not have to worry about bills, and to be young enough that your best friends are not suffering strange new illnesses, like the fibromyalgia affecting so many of my friends.
There was a dark side, certainly. The same nuns who explained why our fathers were heroes also said if we did not pray at least one Rosary a day, then it was inevitable that a nuclear war would occur. Often I would fall asleep, halfway through the prayer sequence, only to have troubled dreams that ended in the explosions of mushroom clouds.
But back in the day, politicians were caring about the middle class. Our school systems were ever expanding, with many communities providing even college educations to the people for little if any money. Our infrastructure was newly built: the Eisenhower era's community colleges, community hospitals and endless freeways all were brand spanking new. The war we were fighting, or about to fight, was not sanitized for easy consumption. We had boots on the ground, and in a few short years, the news programs would be showing us exactly what the war we fought looked like, both to the Vietnamese people and to our troops.
Now in 2014, death that our tax dollars buys and encourages is sanitized. The fact that already one million people in the Ukraine have been displaced is only mentioned by the NYT's, and then way back around page 8 or 10 or maybe page 15. And the Big Endless War in the Middle East carries that early 1930's ring of propaganda to it - that those we kill our terrorists, and who among us has any fondness for terrorists? (And who among us ever even reflect that very term is how the elite of the Third Reich labeled their dissidents, foreigners, and Jews - as terrorists!)
But in the Third Reich, the middle class was given advantages. Many Germans bought their first homes. Many Germans had two week vacations for the first time ever. The Volkswagon - "the People's Automobile" was something every German family could afford.
Few here could point to any "gifting" to the American middle class. Anyone thinking anything these days knows that the One Percent has gotten wealthier, even under this present "Democratic" Administration. We support the wars, because what else can we do? Like that famous quote from "They Thought They Were Free" - "We were not happy with those things, but what could we do? We made a fist inside our pockets."
The American people does not like the "lesser of two Evils" meme. We do not like our tax dollars always readily available for wars, with over 1 trillion spent each year on war, weaponry and surveillance. We do not like the idea of drones, whether for killing foreigners, or for delivering packages. We do not like our militarized police forces. We do not like the lack of regulations over the Big Swindlers calling themselves Bankers, or the fact that our court system is far too friendly with Banking Firms, and Big Energy Firms, and Big Pharma and the rest of it.
The headlines in every other community out there scream "Homeowner shot by police" and the story is broadcast of yet another someone killed by the community police department as the police thought the garden hose nozzle was a gun. We understand that these are not good times. It is ominous, but we content ourselves that at least we don't have troops goosestepping their way down the pavement of the streets where we live. And we try to not think about how no one needs those troops any more - that the police themselves would do the bidding. Yes, they would do the bidding of the Elite, and not two thoughts about it, especially if there was some new catastrophic event, and the call to patriotism.
Because once a nation no longer is a democracy, and once a nation is ruled by those who are thugs (though today's politicians seem pleasant enough, on the surface, and they can address a crowd in a pleasant way, even as they strip their state of clean drinking water via the newly legislated agreements permitting fracking, or give a speech that says one thing one day and a different thing three months later,) then we as a nation will have a chance to test my father's theory about how "over time, people can become barbaric."
Not sure I get your point.
Teddy killed things at a time when killing people was the norm.
Not a stance we are "into" these days, although many here continue to celebrate the election of the very people who keep us in these endless but sanitized wars. (Of course these days we just don't really view much of the agony and bloodshed.) At least Teddy was "into" showing what he was responsible for. (Just as survivors of the Civil War relished their stories of taking out the "enemy."
Our 21st Century media, both print and TV, has far more important matters to handle, like the Kardashians and other nonsense, doesn't it? Than to show us what the mangled bodies of those imploded when our air force drops bombs on those "enemy targets" look like aftert hey ahve been hit.
Somehow, Teddy's world was bit more honest, wasn't it? If you wanna see how dishonest our US officials have become, be sure to listen to Oliver at the point in the vid below when he talks about the meaning of "Imminent."
Many of us baby boomers had fathers who killed things.
My dad, a pacifist upon his return, killed many people during WWII. Killing was something people realized happened during a war. But here in the politically correct USA, in 2014, we pretend death from American weaponry isn't happening, and we allow our leaders to label those huuman beings who are killed as terrorists, as long as they are male, and over the age of 13.
Colbert created a very telling and hard hitting rant against Obama's drone warfare, but his audience laughed cluelessly at every single one of the statements, as though mentioning the death of innocents is a punchline. Colbert, I think, has given up, although John Oliver feels the need to tell the truth:
Today we are funding and killing the very people that Obama wanted us to fight WITH, a mere fourteen months ago. But hey, what a totally perfect scenario for the war profiteers, that yesterday's heroes to be supported are today's terrorists to be reviled.
A Canadian farmer made the top 6 inches of his soil a "work of art" - thus keeping out oil pipelines
And should people from Big Energy firms wish to talk to him, he charges them some $ 500 an hour!
https://www.facebook.com/353739560014/photos/a.10151237768610015.797948.353739560014/10154557272050015/?type=1&theater
If his tactic continues to work, this might be an amazing win-win for both the creative people and the farmers in our society. (As well as for the ecology, of course.) Apparently part of why he gets to coyright the farm is his scuptures that are installed as "art installations." Not all farmers have the artistic gene going on (and some might, but are too busy farming.) So this could be a good thing for city artists who unite with country farmers!
http://aluvionlaw.com/no-its-not-copyright-that-is-keeping-a-natural-gas-pipeline-off-of-peter-von-tiesenhausens-farm/
The newest war there in Syria had to start the moment Russia and China began to pay
For Iranian oil without utilizing the US dollar.
Discuss.
Please DO NOT help me with this unless you know you can go somewhere unsafe on
The internet and get back okay without infecting your computer.
I watch my computer spin out every two hours or so.
It always ends up dumping me on the following site:
s.dessaly.com
And usually there are many letters and numbers in the URL, after the Dot com portion of it.
Then it seems like my typing slows up.
How to I get rid of it? My computer is checked each day by webroot, and I am told by webroot that I have not had a threat since June.
Please Explain This -- BP allows the continued unsafe operation at Deepwater Horizon Oil
Rig, the rig blows up, people are killed, the Gulf of Mexico is destroyed, and not one single arrest.
Meanwhile we read the news and every week there are tidbits like this:
People discovered "illegally" harvesting ginseng - eleven arrests are made.
https://www.facebook.com/CopBlock/photos/a.306193338188.151724.281961363188/10152706243778189/?type=1&theater
Full story about ginseng arrests to be found here:
http://wvmetronews.com/2014/09/18/probe-uncovers-widespread-illegal-ginseng-harvest
Photobucket is losing its hold on folks -
Including me.
What is another free and useful photo website, where I can store my pics?
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Name: CarolGender: Do not display
Hometown: Northern California
Home country: USA
Current location: Office chair
Member since: Sun May 15, 2005, 02:28 PM
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