Did you notice? Monsanto bought Blackwater. It's worse than satire.

Seriously fucked.

You mean like George Zimmerman, who took the law into his own hands and chased down a teenage boy?

Oh, wait, that quote comes from Zimmerman's brother, and he's claiming that there are hacks like his brother who want to kill his brother.

Well, if he felt safer with his gun, he can take that gun back now. That was what it was for, right?

"Banks love securitization because it's cheaper for them than holding loans on their books, and having to pay for them in equity capital and FDIC insurance. But those requirements are precisely what make a market safe and fair. They are buffers against risk, which in securitization gets transferred to investors. The market proved incapable before and during the crisis of properly pricing that risk, and now everyone knows it. So the investors are wisely staying away. And if these markets no longer work, then perhaps it's time to rethink the wisdom of the 30-year fixed rate mortgage (which most other countries don't have) and come up with a way for lenders to retain the risk while still protecting themselves against catastrophe."

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/07/david-dayen-a-revealing-episode-in-dc-groupthink.html

It is with great sorrow I read the following:

Although looking at his foes list I suspect he had to drop me so he could hate someone else instead.

I rather expected a more political "manslaughter" verdict that would be overturned on appeal, or perhaps even pardoned by the Community Organizer-in-Chief himself, magnanimously forgiving the liquidating of that son he didn't build.
Not to make light of a tragedy. I've served with the likes of Trayvon Martin in the military. I'm willing to venture he was probably a typical American kid, and what went down really sucked.
On the other hand, the sheer ghoulishness of the trial, and all of the race-baiting from the Left, was utterly disgusting.
Now, let some peace be sown, please.

What wretched hooey => http://blog.heritage.org/2013/07/11/what-the-house-farm-bills-passage-means/
Sometimes I wish the GOP could suck more.

At least until I put Linux on this notebook. FireFox 21.0 is wierding out like IE6 on a lot of sites, including slashdot. I can't even change my sig.

What browser are you using?

Obama's Soft Totalitarianism: Europe Must Protect Itself from America

A Commentary by Jakob Augstein
Is Barack Obama a friend? Revelations about his government's vast spying program call that assumption into doubt. The European Union must protect the Continent from America's reach for omnipotence.

On Tuesday, Barack Obama is coming to Germany. But who, really, will be visiting? He is the 44th president of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. He is an intelligent lawyer. And he is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

But is he a friend? The revelations brought to us by IT expert Edward Snowden have made certain what paranoid computer geeks and left-wing conspiracy theorists have long claimed: that we are being watched. All the time and everywhere. And it is the Americans who are doing the watching.

On Tuesday, the head of the largest and most all-encompassing surveillance system ever invented is coming for a visit. If Barack Obama is our friend, then we really don't need to be terribly worried about our enemies.

It is embarrassing: Barack Obama will be arriving in Berlin for only the second time, but his visit is coming just as we are learning that the US president is a snoop on a colossal scale. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that she will speak to the president about the surveillance program run by the National Security Agency, and the Berlin Interior Ministry has sent a set of 16 questions to the US Embassy. But Obama need not be afraid. German Interior Minister Hans Peter Friedrich, to be sure, did say: âoeThat's not how you treat friends.â But he wasn't referring to the fact that our trans-Atlantic friends were spying on us. Rather, he meant the criticism of that spying.

Friedrich's reaction is only paradoxical on the surface and can be explained by looking at geopolitical realities. The US is, for the time being, the only global power -- and as such it is the only truly sovereign state in existence. All others are dependent -- either as enemies or allies. And because most prefer to be allies, politicians -- Germany's included -- prefer to grin and bear it.

'It's Legal'

German citizens should be able to expect that their government will protect them from spying by foreign governments. But the German interior minister says instead: âoeWe are grateful for the excellent cooperation with US secret services.â Friedrich didn't even try to cover up his own incompetence on the surveillance issue. âoeEverything we know about it, we have learned from the media,â he said. The head of the country's domestic intelligence agency, Hans-Georg Maassen, was not any more enlightened. âoeI didn't know anything about it,â he said. And Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger was also apparently in the dark. âoeThese reports are extremely unsettling,â she said.

With all due respect: These are the people who are supposed to be protecting our rights? If it wasn't so frightening, it would be absurd.

Friedrich's quote from the weekend was particularly quaint: âoeI have no reason to doubt that the US respects rights and the law.â Yet in a way, he is right. The problem is not the violation of certain laws. Rather, in the US the laws themselves are the problem. The NSA, in fact, didn't even overreach its own authority when it sucked up 97 billion pieces of data in one single 30-day period last March. Rather, it was acting on the orders of the entire US government, including the executive, legislative and judicial branches, the Democrats, the Republicans, the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Supreme Court. They are all in favor. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, merely shrugged her shoulders and said: âoeIt's legal.â

A Monitored Human Being Is Not a Free One

What, exactly, is the purpose of the National Security Agency? Security, as its name might suggest? No matter in what system or to what purpose: A monitored human being is not a free human being. And every state that systematically contravenes human rights, even in the alleged service of security, is acting criminally.

Those who believed that drone attacks in Pakistan or the camp at Guantanamo were merely regrettable events at the end of the world should stop to reflect. Those who still believed that the torture at Abu Ghraib or that the waterboarding in CIA prisons had nothing to do with them, are now changing their views. Those who thought that we are on the good side and that it is others who are stomping all over human rights are now opening their eyes. A regime is ruling in the United States today that acts in totalitarian ways when it comes to its claim to total control. Soft totalitarianism is still totalitarianism.

We're currently in the midst of a European crisis. But this unexpected flare-up of American imperialism serves as a reminder of the necessity for Europe. Does anyone seriously believe that Obama will ensure the chancellor and her interior minister that the American authorities will respect the rights of German citizens in the future? Only Europe can break the American fantasy of omnipotence. One option would be for Europe to build its own system of networks to prevent American surveillance. Journalist Frank Schirrmacher of the respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper recommended that over the weekend. âoeIt would require subsidies and a vision as big as the moon landing,â he argues.

A simpler approach would be to just force American firms to respect European laws. The European Commission has the ability to do that. The draft for a new data privacy directive has already been presented. It just has to be implemented. Once that happens, American secret services might still be able to walk all over European law, but if US Internet giants like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook want to continue making money off of a half-billion Europeans, then they will have to abide by our laws. Under the new law, companies caught passing on data in ways not permitted are forced to pay fines. You can be sure that these companies would in turn apply pressure to their own government. The proposal envisions setting that fine at 2 percent of a company's worldwide revenues.

You're just not as bright as you like to congratulate yourself.

It is very simple. Follow the money. Years ago the wealthy needed a strong middleclass. Henry Ford even commented that a strong middleclass bought the products of the wealthy. But the wealthy no longer make products. Money is earned through money games. And the economy is global.

The goal now is the destruction of the middleclass. Why? So that we'll work for nothing. A sort of coal mining economic theory. Work for nothing and then give what little money you have back when you buy life's necessities at the company store.

As the wealth gets concentrated and the middleclass destroyed there might be some uprisings. The Corporate Government will be able to get the leaders very quickly and thereby diffuse the uprisings literally before they start. Like arresting the persons behind "Occupy Wall Street" before the occupation.

With indefinite detention being the law of the land there will be no need for trials.

And with all that anti terrorism security money going to crowd control weapons like sonic beams that make you burn those crowds that do assemble will be quickly dealt with.

It is always about the money.

Posted by: Ray | Jun 29, 2013 9:27:54 PM

The kind that has to be taught by comedians, in this upside down place.

http://www10.pic-upload.de/26.06.13/htovygv8j3v.jpg

You have your brainwashing, to tell you otherwise.

http://deceivedworld.blogspot.com/2010/07/united-states-remains-british-colony.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7i60GuNRg#at=148

"...the US accounts for a quarter of the world's prisoners."

Counter emancipation.

Suck it, #ManBearPig

From Food Business News:

NEW YORK â" For McDonaldâ(TM)s Corp., it may seem like a supersized dilemma: Offer a healthier menu or serve customers their coveted fattening fare?

Itâ(TM)s a matter of social responsibility versus sales, said Don Thompson, president and chief executive officer, who addressed the topic during the Sanford C. Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York on May 29.

âoeToday, we are in this time period where people are defining quote-unquote âhealthyâ(TM) and ânon-healthy,â(TM)â Mr. Thompson said. âoeAnd the question really is, in the restaurant business, what does the customer want? ⦠Whatever it is a customer wants, we will be selling more than anyone else.â

Ok, Mister Bernstein, I say you're full of shit. I think you WANT us to all be fatasses.

I usually go home for lunch, but my car's in the shop today and don't have time to walk home, eat, and walk back, so I walked down to McDonalds. McDonalds is a lot closer than home. They had a promotional thing up with some new quarter pounders, so I decided to try one. I got the habañero Ranch quarter pounder, which I will get around to trash talking later. I ordered a small fry and a small coke to go along.

"That will be $7.52".

"How much was the burger itself?" I forgot what her answer was but it seemed like a hell of a lot for a hamburger. When I was 12 a McDonald's hamburger, fries, and small coke was 37 cents plus tax. Of course, the minimum wage was something like a dollar back then. She told me the price, I winced and said "too much, but I'll pay it anyway."

"The value meal may be cheaper," she said. I said ok. She rang it up. $7.01.

A burger with a small fry and small coke costs more than a burger with a medium fry and a medium coke. Why does McDonalds want me to get fat? I wound up throwing half the fries away, that's way too much food. Plus McDonalds fries are nasty. I didn't like the burger, either. False advertising if I ever saw it. Habañero? Really? Habañeros are one of the hottest peppers there are, and that burger had no hint whatever of any kind of hot pepper.

Of course, there's a sit-down restaurant that's even worse on the spicy front, on the corner of Second and South Grand named the (checks Google Maps... WTF, google? I search for 2nd and South Grand and it gives me 2nd and North Grand. Should I start using Microsoft Bling? Drags map down to South Grand... here it is) sorry, called the MeKong Cafe. It seems that General DuCatt or however you spell it traveled back in time from Cardassia and opened a barbershop in Springfield... anyway, the MeKong's window says they specialize in Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Thai food. Having been in Thailand in the USAF and loving that food, I ate at the MeKong diner once.

I was not impressed.

Thai peppers are ounce for ounce some of the hottest peppers there are; they're tiny little things, half an inch (couple of centimeters) long and eating one will bring far more tears to your eyes than eating a jalapeño. I grew some, years ago -- they're great for getting rid of a sinus headache. Like Mexican food and for the same reason, Thai food is hot. Damned hot. Shirt wringing wet hot, which is why spicy food is so popular in Thailand and Mexico; Thailand is almost at the equator. The whole year I was there it only got cooler than eighty F once.

So I'd stopped at this so-called "MeKong" restaurant and ordered cowpot. Cowpot is Thai for "fried rice".

"Um, what?" the oriental waitress said, obviously not being from Thailand or, indeed, South East Asia at all.

"Thai fried rice," I said.

"Do you want it hot?"

"Of course I want it hot. I want it to taste like what I ate in Thailand. Blistering hot."

It was wimpier than Chinese fried rice.

There are a lot of fake foreign restaurants at that corner, probably catering to all the government employees that work in two large buildings that sit caddy-corner from each other there. There's a Taco Gringo, which is about as far from Mexican food as you can get, a Chinese place called China One, and another oriental restaurant named, hilariously, Dynasty.

Sheesh, I thought software devs came up with stupid names, like GIMP and WinCE. But a restaurant named the Die Nasty?

Anyway, back on topic, it isn't just their "value meals," either. Why is a hamburger with one patty and one slice of cheese more expensive than a hamburger with TWO patties and a slice of cheese?

Why do they want everybody, especially the poor and/or frugal, to be fat?

I will say one nice thing about McFatsos, though -- their side salads are really surprisingly good. Yeah, it's hard to screw up a salad but Burger King manages to. I'll get the salad, take it home, and eat it with a steak and baked potato. THAT's food, not faux cowpot or a hamburger with bacon (to disguise the taste of the beef, of course) or a taco some gringo made.