"There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better word. "
http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/rise_up_or_die_20130519/

It was a beautiful day today, and my boss wasn't at work. The TV weatherman had said on the early morning news that it was going to rain tomorrow and for the next week, too. So I took the afternoon off.

I'd say my favorite radio station is a local college station, WQNA. Their music is an incredibly eclectic mix of genres; rock, punk, ska, country, old jazz from the thirties, you name it. Hell, they play belly dancing music on Wednesday nights. Well, they used to, I don't know if that show's still on. An old friend I've known for twenty years hosts a blues show on noon Sundays. On Wednesday mornings there's a show on called Ben's wacky radio that runs from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM (US central time). The show is a Doctor Demento knockoff, and I was a Demento fan decades ago, so I hit the WQNA button on the radio when I got in the car to leave.

When I got home I turned on the TV, which serves as a forty two inch computer monitor, and clicked "WQNA" on Aramok's playlist. They stream in MP3 and AAC from their website, and there's no real radio in the house. Not needed; as far as I know, every radio station in the world streams over the internet.

I started working on Nobots.

The announcer said that the next half hour was devoted to Star Trek, so I put the laptop down because I knew the radio was going to be too distracting.

A song came on that the "Ben" guy said was by the actor Terry McGovern called Beam Me Up, Scotty. As I listened to the nerdy song I thought "Hey! That guy's read The Paxil Diaries!" My googlefu is weak today; I can't find the lyrics, but it's about how shitty life is on Earth. "My wife went away and took the car and left the bills and the kids".

I'm sitting here, all proud and smug and pleased with myself and googling for the lyrics when I came across this.

McGovern wrote the song in 1976, the year I got married.

Oh, well, at least you guys read it.

I think someone else may have already mentioned this a while back but I hadn't seen it myself before today. The zoo.pl script (used for friends in particular) is broken.

More specifically, it seems to be broken when I try to call it up in firefox. If I am running chrome it works as it is supposed to. If I try to use it in firefox I get a non-helpful error.

This wouldn't have been broken by virtue of being used (and abused) by a former slashdot employee who was known for carrying an extensive perma-hate list of foes, would it? Naah, that doesn't sound that likely.

A while ago, some billionare brothers, who hardly pay any taxes and never give more than casual lip service to things like the plight of workers or environmental stewardship decided they needed a way to pay even less in taxes and care even less about the part of the world that is not insanely wealthy. They decided one way or another that the best way to meet this goal was to start their own political movement; which they ironically called the "tea party". This party promised uninformed voters the world.

The Tea Party rather bluntly declared itself to have objectives including avoiding taxes altogether and the destruction of the IRS. They made various claims of income taxes being unconstitutional and also statements of how good god-fearing Americans should do everything they can to avoid paying taxes, including not filling out tax claims at all. Then, in a rather strange twist this new political movement filed with the IRS for tax exempt status - rather than just simply avoiding taxes altogether in the way they had advocated for their followers to do.

And now, this group that has openly called for the end of the IRS and taxes, is crying foul that the IRS was investigating it.

When people left the country to avoid the military draft, they were shunned as outcasts, hippies, cowards, commies, and Un-American. But now we have a group that is openly opposing the government and we are being told - even by the supposed leftist media - that they should be greatly rewarded for their courage.

What the fuck happened to this country?

I was already in a bad mood when I got to work. My arthritis was hurting badly and McDonalds got my order wrong, I was almost late from taking it back, and the office was freezing. I logged in to the network, and opened IE because the Outlook email client stupidly has no way to change your password. Adobe informed me Flash needed upgrading so I clicked OK. It asked if I wanted to install a Chrome frame for IE and I unchecked the box and clicked OK.

The damned thing installed a Google toolbar in IE, installed Chrome, and made it the default browser!

I uninstalled them and reset IE as the default browser; it isn't my computer, it belongs to my employer and I'm supposed to use their approved software. I hate my work computer. When I uninstalled Chrome, IE opened by itself to a firewall "Forbidden!" page, listing it as "shareware, freeware".

It was really cold, my arthritis was killing me and I went home. I won't be upgrading Flash on any of my own computers, because trojans are evil, even when they're written by Adobe, Google, Sony, or anybody else. I'll probably uninstall all Adobe products from my own machines except one; sometimes channel 49 won't come in so I need it for the Big Bang Theory.

Google, your motto is a God damned lie. I've been a faithful Google user since you first put the search engine on the internet; it was heads and shoulders better than any of the others and still is. I cheered when you used the Linux kernel in Android. I was an early G+ user when you had to know somebody to get an account. I have a gMail address (I seldom check its mail, though).

But these stealth installs are bullshit. That behavior is not acceptable and I won't tolerate it. I won't be back on G+ or gMail and I may bight the bullet and start using that shitty Bing.

When I see or hear that you've changed your ways I'll be back. Hurry, though, because I'm thinking of buying a new phone and I really don't want Apple or Microsoft.

I will repeat myself here -- it is never acceptable to install anything at all on anyone else's computer without their permission, ever, for any reason. No exceptions.

Slashdotters, please inform your non-nerd friends of this rule, just the other night a guy I know was steaming because his daughter in law had "messed up my computer."

Google, I'm really, really disappointed in you.

The rabbit hole goes deeper. What he seaid in the earlier weeks, this year:

"The formula for a public assassination is: the character assassination before the physical assassination; so one has to be made killable before the eyes of the public in order for their eventual murder to then (be) deemed justifiable.

"And when the time arrives for these hits to be carried out, you're not going to see a CIA agent with a suit & tie, and a badge that says 'CIA'.

"What they will do is to out-source to local police departments in the region of their target, and to employ those that look like the target of interest to infiltrate the workings in order to set up the environment for the eventual assassination (character, physical/incarceration, exile) to take place."

http://sjlendman.blogspot.ca/2013/05/malcolm-shabazzs-suspicious-death.html

It isn't the fault of the New Atheists- they don't know enough history to know where they went wrong. Mainly because it happened a hundred years before they were born.

Suggest that free will exists and will never be able to be duplicated in an artificial intelligence. 69 replies to my sub-thread.

I have said many times that the difference between capitalism and socialism is one of cardinality. Socialism is the singular corporation. Capitalism, if it be more than oligarchy, is a full-on multitude.

Dude, don't bogart that joint. I want to know what magic definition of "human" you're operating under, who manages that definition, and the size of your kickback for being such a useful patsy.
Full disclosure: my definition is the liberty-conveying one found in the New Testament, and I'm not buying any of these variations on Marx. Karl, indeed, preached "The Kingdom of God, hold the God," with the corpse piles of the last 170 years to show for it.

http://i.imgur.com/7DgVkf7.jpg

By HSBC. Everywhere you look. I'd love to get a few of these on the jetway gantries:
http://alternativebanking.nycga.net/files/2013/02/NewAdCampaignForHSBC2_web.jpg

And the Federalists were fascist bastards.

"By transforming democracy into a concept that encouraged uninhibited wealth accumulation rather than wealth equality, the founding elite (and subsequent generations of elites) tamed what they could not defeat. They turned democracy from a threat into an asset by making it into a concept that supported their own ideals and interests."

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2011/11/concerning-american-change-in.html

Certainly, let there be a fair trial.
But for the seemingly unambiguous cases like this one unfolding in Cleveland, I say, to paraphrase the Brother's Grimm, let them

You Cannot Unsee What has Been Seen

You must keep "anti-semitism" alive.

Hollywood Conservative Leader Turns Out to Be Holocaust Revisionist

Yeah. There's no disinformation network or false narratives planted in the media. Hal was just a fluke.